River Deep (15 page)

‘I’ve got it! She’s possessed me!’ she cried out loud. ‘Not content with my boyfriend, the bloody gorgeous bitch has gone after my soul as well!’ For at least three seconds it seemed feasible. Mrs Kim came out from her back room and looked at Maggie.

‘Who are you talking to, dear?’ she enquired politely, without any indication that she thought Maggie was mad.

‘Oh, um well … myself, Mrs Kim,’ Maggie said lamely. During her long acquaintance with Mrs Kim and her daily bottle of Gold Label, Maggie had never known her to be fazed by anything or anyone. So, she thought, in for a penny, in for a pound. ‘I thought perhaps Christian’s new girlfriend had possessed me?’ Maggie gave a little defiant ‘so what if I’m crazy’ shrug, but Mrs Kim’s smile never wavered.

‘Oh yes?’ she replied pleasantly. ‘How’s that?’

‘Well, see …’ Maggie thought she’d try choosing her words carefully for a change. ‘This morning I woke up and I was dreaming about her, and since then she’s been all I can think about. I’m even imagining that I
am
her, and …’ Maggie trailed off, aware that she was possibly sounding a bit too mad even for the unflappable Mrs Kim. ‘What do you think? Do I need a shrink?’

Mrs Kim chewed her lip for a moment as she studied Maggie’s face.

‘Have you ever considered that you might be a …’

‘A lesbian? Yes, I did this morning. But it’s the oral sex thing I can’t be doing with. I think kissing and touching and all that, well, you know, I could take it or leave it. But as soon as I thought about, you know, going “downstairs”, nope, it’s not for me.’

Mrs Kim’s serenity might have rippled just momentarily, Maggie wasn’t sure.

‘I was going to say a touch jealous,’ Mrs Kim finished kindly. ‘But I’m glad you’ve cleared that up.’ As Maggie’s blush radiated outwards from her blazing cheeks to the tips of her toes and the crown of her head she offered Mrs Kim her credit card, fervently praying that it would have enough credit to pay for the work.

‘No need, dear.’ Mrs Kim waved the card away. ‘I’ve opened you a business account, so you can pay me at the end of the month. I’ve seen what you did at Fresh Talent. I know you’ll make good.’

Maggie smiled at her gratefully and tucked the card back in her wallet.

‘Well, that wasn’t really me. But thanks Mrs Kim. I won’t let you down, I swear.’

She collected her plans and hesitated for a moment. It wouldn’t hurt, would it, just to ask Mrs Kim? She seemed so grounded, somehow, practically mystical. Maggie wasn’t up on her eastern religions, but she thought Mrs Kim might be a Buddhist, and Buddhists usually had something pretty Zen to say on most things didn’t they?

‘So, um, Mrs Kim? What would you do about her? The other girlfriend, I mean?’ Maggie asked her. She still thought of herself as Christian’s girlfriend, even if he didn’t. For once Mrs Kim’s small smile broke into a big grin.

‘That’s easy,’ she said sagely. ‘I’d rip the bloody bitch to pieces!’

‘She actually used those words?’ Sarah asked her incredulously. She was sorting out the colour trolley while Luce was helping Becca and Sam to put rollers on a dummy head. It was training morning, but Luce had a hangover so Sarah had let her off anything harder in the hopes that when they opened for clients she wouldn’t fry anyone’s head under the dryer or give someone an impromptu bald spot. Again.

‘Those exact words,’ Maggie replied. ‘And she looked like she meant every word she said. I was almost scared. I mean, you know, if Louise fell under a bus then I wouldn’t be mourning, but … well.’ Secretly Maggie felt the same way as Mrs Kim, but for once she decided to keep her more inappropriate thoughts to herself.

Sarah shrugged. ‘Well, you know the world is populated by millions of people, all with their own private stories. Maybe Mr Kim did the dirty on her with a lady boy and she’s got them both in the cellar. Maybe she was a ninja before settling in St As.’

Maggie frowned. ‘I think you’re mixing your Asian countries pretty liberally there, Sarah. But I get the general idea.’ Maggie shrugged off the memory of the steely glint in Mrs Kim’s eye and went back to the more important topic. ‘Anyway, she made me think, and she’s right. Not about killing her; about the fact that I’m insane with jealousy.’

‘Well, duh. I could have told you that,’ Becca interjected helpfully.

Maggie ignored her. ‘What I mean is, that I need to confront my demons in order to conquer them.’

‘Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer!’ Sam added happily. Maggie smiled at him and Sarah worried about how he’d even heard of Buffy.

‘Sort of, Sam,’ Maggie said. ‘What I mean is, I need to know what I’m up against so that I can be better than her. I need to see her again. And this time I need to see her in person.’

And that was how it happened that an hour or so later Maggie was standing face to face with Louise.

When Pete woke up that same morning, the first thing he thought of was that he was late. He leapt out of bed, walked into his tiny wardrobe, backed dizzily on to his bed again, and rubbed his hands through his hair and roughly over his face. Eventually the corners of the room stabilised and he took an experimental squint at his alarm clock. Five-forty-two a.m. Bollocks. Pete lay back on the bed and looked at the now familiar landscape of his ceiling. He knew he wouldn’t be going back to sleep. For some reason, these days, whenever he woke up with a hangover it didn’t matter how shite he felt, sleep always eluded him. He’d just have to kill time until he had to go and face the ungrateful fuckers that were his students, his eyes growing ever more hollow and his skin increasingly waxy. Stella would never sleep with him when he was hungover, which was a shame as shagging was about the only thing he felt up to then. A nice long, lazy, friendly shag with someone he loved. But even if Stella was here she wouldn’t be up for it, he mused, so he might as well forget about the whole concept.

He couldn’t remember anything after his second whisky last night. Well, he could remember bits and pieces, like fragments of a foreign-language film playing without subtitles. He remembered the unforgiving fluorescence of the kebab shop. And at some point he thought he’d put his head between his knees and … no, he must have imagined this bit – but for some reason he thought he remembered Falcon holding his forehead as he chucked up over some poor sod’s garden fence. Pete shook his head and smiled guiltily to himself. He’d not done stuff like that in years. Years and years, not since Stella and her taste for fancy bars and champagne cocktails.

There was something else, though. Something else tugging uncomfortably at the edges of his consciousness that gave him a deep sense of disquiet. He played back his haphazard trip home in his mind’s eye, but he couldn’t find anything too terrible there. Embarrassing, yes, but not terrible. He thought he remembered coming in, bumping into Angie in the hallway, and Falcon gripping her ample hips with his hands and pulling her giggling into his room. What then? Well, then he must have come up and got out of his kecks and …

‘Oh fuck.’ Pete’s stomach lurched and he clapped his hand over his eyes. ‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Please, please let me have dreamt it. Please,
please
let me have dreamt it.’ He leapt off his bed, his head banging like a drum, and raced to the PC. ‘Oh fuck, it’s on, it’s still on. Fuck.’ Pete stared at the frozen screen saver. He tried to control, alt, delete it but it was firmly stuck and he knew he’d have to reboot the whole thing. ‘Maybe I left it on
before
I went out,’ he said with faint hope.

With trepidation Pete logged on to his email and waited. There were no new replies, and for once he was relieved. With one eye closed he opened his sent mail and all his worst fears were confirmed. There it was, sitting there. A message to Stella sent at twelve-twenty-two a.m. He’d written to her when he was drunk. When he was absolutely mind-numbingly bladdered. When he was as fucked as a bloke with a brainectomy. As tempting as it was to just leave it, or delete it, Pete knew he had to know what he’d written. If it wasn’t too bad, maybe he could try some damage limitation. Suicide maybe. After all, people are always much more forgiving of the dead.

Dear Stella
, Pete read. So far so good.

Christ, I miss you so much. Why haven’t you written to me? Why haven’t you been in touch? How do you think it makes me feel, you on the other side of the world when we’re supposed to be getting married and nothing, I’ve heard nothing from you
. Pete closed his eyes for a moment and swallowed the urge to vomit. After the literally bitter moment had passed, he forced himself to look again.

Ha, ha! Just joking. Actually, things here are really great!! I had the interview for the film job today and got it. The bloke said I was so experienced that he gave me a better job than the one I went for, better paid even. Next month I’ll be working with Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts
. Pete cringed. On the one hand he was grateful that his plastered self had checked the pitiful gushing (although he had failed to delete it). On the other hand he wished with his whole being that he hadn’t decided to make up a load of crap he could never live up to, just to impress Stella. He read on anxiously.
I have made a lot of friends here. Falcon, who is in a band that is about to break the States. He is also the new Damien Hirst. Angie is the blonde I live with. She’s a right goer. Oh. And I met this girl called Maggie. We have a lot in common and are becoming really really good friends. I think you would like her – she’s got these huge dark eyes and a sort of Audrey Hepburn thing going on. She’s really funny and a good laugh too. Well, maybe you’ll log on soon.

I do miss you, baby
.

Pete xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Pete read the email again and again and gradually his feeling of panic subsided. OK, so, it was pretty bad, but not as bad as it might have been. Yes, he’d started out pathetic, but he’d retracted it. Yes, he’d made up a shitload of bullshit, but now he’d said it out loud to Stella, his inspiration, maybe he could really make it happen? Although he wasn’t sure about the Bruce Willis bit. And as for describing a girl he’d hardly known as his new best friend, well …

On the second or third time Stella had left Pete, he hadn’t fully understood their relationship and, thinking she had really gone for good, he had started seeing someone else, the girl from work called Candi. Really she’d been called something like Maureen, but had changed her name to Candi at secondary school and still dotted her ‘i’ with a love heart. Pete liked her – she was pretty flaky, but funny. She had a slight fragility, which appealed to him, and he liked her red hair and white skin. She didn’t get close to Stella and how she made him feel, but they had been good friends and happy lovers. Pete had thought that, given time, his pain over Stella might even have faded to a bearable background level.

Then Stella had come back and trampled all over it. Pete had been amazed – astounded, actually – by how she had reacted to the news that he had someone else. Until that moment, until he’d seen her eyes blazing, seen her weeping with abandon, he hadn’t known that she loved him just as much as he loved her. He hadn’t known he had the power to make her jealous. After a stormy and passionate argument (well, more of a one-woman tirade), they had had the most incredible sex of Pete’s life. Stella had promised that she’d never leave him to fall into the clutches of another woman again. The next morning, still shaky from Stella’s passion, Pete had led Candi into a spare office and told her the news. He had been embarrassed and ashamed when she’d crumpled right in front of him. He’d wanted to reach out and hold her but didn’t know how to. Everything he said to her sounded trite and clichéd, but as much as he liked and respected her, there was nothing he could do to make things different. Stella was Stella and, well, everyone else was just everyone else. In the end he was relieved when she got angry with him, punched him hard in the shoulder and stormed out. She’d never come back to the studio and Pete had felt bad about that, because those sorts of jobs were hard to come by in Leeds. He phoned a bloke he knew at Granada, faxed him Candi’s CV and asked him to let her know directly if anything came up, making him promise not to mention his name. She’d got a job there about two weeks later so it had made him feel a bit better, but not that much, to be honest.

Even so, nothing, not even someone as sweet as Candi, held a candle to Stella’s fiercely burning supernova. Pete had promised never to hurt Stella that way again, and he never had. And he never would … but if she thought he had a really nice female friend, someone who might just be after him even if, say, he didn’t realise it? Well it just might make her come home a little sooner. Pete tapped his finger against the keyboard thoughtfully.

‘But am I a total shit for fibbing to Stella and using Maggie like this behind her back when I don’t even know her that well?’ An idea clicked in Pete’s mind as he switched off the PC. Stella had often told him the truth was there to be creative with, and since in this case he’d be doing it for him and her, it was really a romantic gesture more than lying. And if he really did make friends with Maggie, if he did get to know her, then it wouldn’t be that much of a lie. After all, they were in the same boat – she was still crazy over her bloke and desperate to get him back. So he’d be telling Stella practically the truth, while hurting or betraying no one. Problem solved.

Now all he had to do was find a way to bump into Maggie again.

‘I’m sorry, what did you say you name was?’ Louise asked Maggie pleasantly, with the slightest rise of her perfectly arched brow. For a moment Maggie panicked and almost bolted for the door. For a moment she nearly blurted out, ‘I’m Maggie, Maggie Johnson, Christian’s girlfriend! The one he dumped for you!’ but instead she breathed in and concentrated on the same slightly surreal sensation of certainty that had led her here in the first place. Noticing the Spanish ruffles on the sleeves of Louise’s red silk blouse, Maggie returned her enquiry with a brisk, businesslike smile.