River Deep (33 page)

Maggie stretched on Sarah’s sofa and contemplated getting off it and making her way to the bathroom. She knew she should because apart from the fact that she’d heard Sam complaining outside the closed door a while back that he was missing his cartoons, she had thousands of things to do today, having a pee being the most pressing right now.

Somehow, though, every part of her body felt coated in lead and all she wanted to do was turn and face the back of the sofa and curl up and stay there, staring at minute row upon minute row of sage green chenille. This hadn’t happened to her in a long time, in a very long time. Even when Christian had left her she had managed to get out of bed in the morning, fired up with the prospect of getting him back. But now, finally, on this Monday morning when everything should have been beginning, it had hit her – the same lurching disability that had used to waylay her whenever she was faced with having to do something that seemed almost impossible. Total, wanton, deadly apathy. She forced herself into a sitting position, her head hanging over to one side.

It must just be everything that had happened recently. She must be experiencing some kind of delayed shock, a fear of how terrible things would be if she messed it all up even more than she already had done, which was fairly spectacularly, even for her. Only it wasn’t fear, it was apathy – she didn’t care any more. Suddenly, she just didn’t care about what happened to The Fleur or her parents or Christian or Pete. Maggie huffed out a breath with some effort. The last time she’d been like this was just before the finals of her degree.

‘But you’ve done all the work!’ her friends had told her as she lay in her bed, her duvet pulled over her head. ‘You’re the star pupil, and anyway the degree’s marked on continuous assessment – you’ve probably already passed!’

‘I don’t care!’ Maggie had managed to tell them. ‘I don’t care if I pass or not. Go away.’

They’d had to drag her into a standing position, force her into her clothes and frogmarch her into the hall. She’d sat the exams, of course, and once they’d begun she’d forgotten all about the apathy. But now it was here again, and she felt paralysed by it. The enormity of everything she had to do to straighten out her life and the lives around her overwhelmed her. She couldn’t begin to see how she could ever release herself from the deadlock, and she just wanted to go to sleep instead.

Sarah’s living room door opened a crack and Sam’s afro made a tentative entrance two inches before one of his light grey eyes did.

‘Are you awake now?’ he demanded loudly, ensuring that she would be.

‘Yes, Sam, come in, darling.’ Maggie told him, and he ran in, skidding on his knees to the TV set which he switched on to his favourite channel. Maggie watched whichever cartoon it was with him for a minute or two before the pressing need of her bladder forced her to her feet.

‘Hi,’ Sarah called out to her from the small galley kitchen as she padded down the hall. ‘How are you? You didn’t have to stay last night, you know. It was kind of you, though, to stay up to God knows when listening to me going on about …’ Sarah glanced at Becca’s shut door … ‘everything.’

Maggie shrugged without pausing and pointed herself towards the bathroom.

‘I’ll make you a coffee then?’ Sarah called after, taking her silence as assent.

Maggie looked at herself bleakly in Sarah’s bathroom mirror. For a moment, when Pete had kissed her, she’d felt incredible, beautiful and powerful. She baulked at using the phrase, but then, with a what-the-hell shrug, told herself she’d felt … sexual. It wasn’t that her sex life with Christian hadn’t been satisfactory, it had been more than. But somehow that
almost
chaste kiss, the static passion of it, had swept through her like a forest fire. If Maggie was a character in a romantic novel, she’d say it had awakened her to the possibilities of sexual love.

She filled Sarah’s sink to the brim with ice-cold water and shoved her head into it, emerging a few seconds later to see her bedraggled self staring back at her, resembling nothing more than a drowned rat.

‘This is what I’m
really
like,’ she told herself in a hoarse whisper. ‘Scrawny and thin and …’ she examined the darkly black recesses of her eyes … ‘and dark.’ She didn’t know what Stella looked like, so in her mind’s eye she melded her into one being with Louise. A sort of uber-nemeses, light to her dark, full curves to her wasted emptiness. She grabbed Becca’s wide-toothed comb from the sink and combed her hair back off her face. Of course she knew she was being overdramatic, but she didn’t care; it was one up, at least, on the apathy. Stripping off Sarah’s nightshirt she began to dress in yesterday’s crumpled clothes.

With everything that had happened she’d forgotten to worry about Christian and his date with Louise, proposed especially, Louise had said, to ‘talk things over’. She thought about it now and found that even this she didn’t have the energy to care about. Perhaps Christian had left Louise, and perhaps he was sitting on her doorstep right now with a dozen roses, waiting for her return. Maggie pictured the image and tried to feel something about it, but she couldn’t. She tried picturing Christian and Louise in each other’s arms having worked everything out, and found at last a small sensation of disquiet. Disquiet not at the thought of them being together, she realised, but that – as it turned out this morning, at least – she wasn’t really all that fussed. Maggie tapped her forehead hard with the heel of her palm.

‘Come on!’ she told herself angrily. ‘Get going, you idiot!’ She didn’t just mean out of the flat and back to work, she meant literally, emotionally, physically. She felt as if she had spluttered to a haltering stop. Stalled.

‘Maggie?’ Sarah said from the other side of the door. ‘Your coffee’s here?’

Maggie opened the door and took it gratefully, tanking at least half of it in one gulp, regardless of its heat. She looked at Sarah, who beckoned her into the bedroom.

‘Are you OK?’ Sarah asked her.

Maggie noticed her friend’s skin bruised with shadows, her eyes still swollen and red.

‘Are
you
OK?’ she replied.

Sarah shrugged. ‘I’ll be OK when I think that Becca and I are really OK. I know she doesn’t understand why I did it.
I
hardly understand it. I just wanted to cling on to everything that I’ve got, everything I’ve fought for despite him. And I was afraid of seeing him again. I still am, actually. Petrified.’

Maggie nodded, remembering Sarah’s retelling of the phone call last night after Becca had finally gone to bed. He’d been shocked to hear from Sarah for a start, and then, Sarah had felt, had been really delighted to talk to her again. When she told him about Becca, he’d been stunned into silence and for a while, as she’d talked, she wasn’t sure if he was still on the other end of the line. She’d tried her best to explain, in that oddly disconnected way, things that should only be explained face to face. She’d told him the way things were and why it had been so hard for her to admit to him that he was Becca’s, leaving out as much about her personal feelings about him and what he had meant to her as she could. It was tragic, Maggie realised, almost Shakespearean. If Sarah’s mum had passed on the letters that Aidan had sent her and hadn’t thrown them away, they might have worked things out differently. Unlikely given their ages at the time, but they’d have had a chance, and Becca would have known her dad from the start. Fourteen years later and it wouldn’t be possible for a mere letter to wreck a long-distance romance, not with email and international phone calls being so cheap. Just a few short years would have made the world of difference to them. But in that time, in that place, they were not meant to be. Anyway, after a halting conversation Sarah had finally handed the phone to her daughter and left the room to join Maggie and Sam.

‘Is he coming?’ Maggie had asked her.

‘Yes, as soon as he can,’ Sarah had told her, her face perfectly still as she pictured eighteen-year-old Aidan the last time she had seen him. ‘He’s even got an American accent, imagine that.’

They hadn’t talked about it again until Becca had finally come down off the ceiling and gone to bed, exhausted by triumph and elation. She’d have to be here, Maggie realised, at Sarah’s shoulder through all of the things that were to come: Sarah would need her. Maggie breathed a sigh of relief as she felt how much she cared about Sarah and her small family. It wasn’t the whole world, then, that she didn’t give a fig for, just her small part of it.

‘You were talking to yourself in the bathroom.’ Sarah interrupted her thoughts. ‘Not out of character, I know, but anyway,
are
you OK?’

Maggie sighed and plonked down on Sarah’s bed in one fell motion. Sarah looked at her alarm clock and looked fairly alarmed herself. She had to open up in ten minutes.

‘I’ve got the apathy,’ Maggie said. ‘I don’t care about my life any more. I’ve tried and tried and tried, and where’s it got me? …’

She was about to finish ‘nowhere’, but Sarah stepped in.

‘Um, a business, family, friends who love you? Two men fighting over you?’

Maggie sat up, remembering Sarah’s previous lecture before the whole Aidan thing had blown up.

‘They’re not fighting. No one is fighting. Everyone is decidedly not fighting,’ Maggie said, at least finding the impetus to string a sentence together. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Sarah, this whole kiss thing. It’s, well, it’s like this. Pete kissed me and it was all … wooooo.’ Maggie realised her powers of description were lamentable, but Pete’s kiss had tended to make her speechless whenever she thought about it, which had been approximately every two point four seconds since the moment it had happened, even, to her shame, during yesterday’s dramas.

‘The kiss was “all woo”. Right,’ Sarah replied matter-of-factly, as if Maggie had handed her a two-thousand-word essay on the subject. ‘So go to him, tell him. Make it happen, woman!’

Maggie shook her head despondently.

‘I can’t. Because of Christian. Because he’s the one I’m meant to be with. We’ve got this whole life that’s waiting for us to get back to it, and I can’t just abandon that on a whim.’

Sarah rolled her eyes but kept her mouth shut.

‘And anyway, because Pete’s got this other girl, and he told me that one kiss doesn’t change how much he loves her … which I understand, because of Christian …’

Maggie trailed off and Sarah looked at her watch pointedly.

‘So forget it, then, if you’re not going to do anything about it. Just forget it.’

Maggie took the hint and stood up, gathering her belongings with an effort of energy.

‘No, it’s not that. I mean, it’s not
just
that.’ She chewed her lip. ‘The kiss was all “woo” and blew me away, but it’s not the kiss by itself, it’s Pete. He’s just … I really like him, Sarah. It’s like I feel I’ve always known him. If the kiss and the other woman mean I can’t know him any more, then I’m going to be sad about it. Really properly sad. It’ll take me a long time not to be sad, I think. Stupid, isn’t it? A couple of weeks ago and I didn’t even know him.’

Sarah looked at her. It occurred to her to say all the obvious things, like for God’s sake, woman, you are clearly in love with this man, forget about Christian, who has probably forgotten about you, and just go and get Pete. But her tactic of stating the obvious had never worked so far with Maggie; not once, in actual fact. If anything it always seemed to drive her in the opposite direction.

‘So if you mean that,’ she said instead, ‘go to him and tell him that. Make sure you stay friends.’ That way Sarah thought, at least they’d be in the same room together and nature might take its course.

‘Do you think so?’ Maggie said.

Sarah nodded.

‘OK, I will. I’ll do that. He’s got an interview tomorrow, so I could go round after that to see how it went and everything, and talk to him about it, clear it all up, and we can be real friends again!’ Her face had suddenly animated into a smile at the thought of having a sensible reason to see Pete again. ‘I have to do the whole supplier thing today,’ she said, ‘I’ve made appointments. Jim is taking me in his Capri, so I might be dead by tomorrow, but if not I’ll definitely go and see him. That’s a good idea. Thanks, Sarah. I’d better get going!’

Maggie kissed her friend and descended the stairs into the salon two steps at a time. The apathy had gone the moment she’d thought of seeing Pete again. Of course, Maggie didn’t make that connection. She’d forgotten all about her morning sense of doom by the time she hit the street.

There was someone waiting for her outside The Fleur as she hurried back, but it wasn’t Christian or Pete, it was just Jim, leaning against the side of his double-parked Capri, resplendent in its matt silver bodywork, red passenger door and blue driver’s door and hood. Jim loved his car with a passion she had never seen him reserve for anything human. For years he’d worked on it in his considerable spare time, turning the whole of the customer’s car park into a garage and spending a fortune of mostly his parents’ money. He said it was a classic car. Maggie thought it was a pile of junk, but right now it was the closest thing they had to a company car. She wondered if she could reasonably ask Jim to park it out of sight of the places they were going so she could walk the last few feet without embarrassment. She decided that she probably could.

‘You’re late,’ Jim said, looking at the part of his wrist where a watch would be if he owned one.

‘Yeah, well, you’re on time,’ Maggie scoffed out of habit. ‘Which, frankly, is nearly as shocking as that tie you’re wearing.’ She gestured to a paisley effort that he must have lifted from her father’s wardrobe. ‘What were you thinking?’

Jim sighed. ‘I was making an effort. I put on a tie and got ready on time, which is more than I can say for you.’

Maggie looked down at herself: her trousers were crumpled and her top was not so lightly fragranced with Sarah’s cigarettes and red wine.

‘I’d better nip in and have a shower …’ she said, making for the door.

‘Oh no you don’t!’ Jim grabbed her arm. ‘We’ll be late for Brownly’s. I spoke to him yesterday, he said he’s got this almost complete kitchen out of a hotel, only ten years old, in really good nick. The hotel got bought out and got a refit for good measure. He said it’ll be gone by the end of today.’