But she deserves to know the truth, doesn’t she?’
Christie stopped. The truth. It was easier to say it than to live it. She wasn’t telling anyone her own truth, was she?
‘We’ve all done things we thought we should hide,’ she said carefully. ‘I’ve hidden stuff from the people I love and I wish to God I hadn’t because it eats you up from the inside out.’
‘How can I tell her any of this now?’ Faye groaned. ‘After all the lies I’ve told her.’ ‘You’ve reached the point where you can’t do anything but tell her,’ Christie said. ‘She knows what a good person you are, because that’s how you’ve brought her up. And the truth is it wasn’t completely your fault, Faye. Stop imagining what other people will think and realise you were a scared, vulnerable young woman. Forgive yourself.
Stop thinking of how everyone else would live your life in your shoes. You have to live it. You had to live it and you did your best. Tell her, face that truth.’ Christie knew now she wasn’t just talking to Faye, but also to herself.
Maggie, hanging on to every word, stared at Christie. Her hand unconsciously stroked the top of her thigh through her jeans, touching the scars that lay underneath, scars that would never go away.
So facing the truth made you stronger? She hadn’t thought of that before. She’d certainly never faced any of the truths in her own life, she’d buried them instead, kept them from her family and friends, from everyone. But perhaps she had been wrong to do that.
‘But what if Amber doesn’t come back?’ Faye asked.
Christie tried to push her mind into the future.
It never worked that way, not usually. The future came to her, rather than the other way round. But now, in the face of Faye’s raw, naked pain, she tried. And when the answer came to her in a flash, it was a mother’s intuition rather than anything otherworldly.
‘You’ve got to go and find her.’
Amber had expected flowers and wine, well, even a few beers. After all, it was a horrible Monday morning and she’d just had the row from hell with her mother and had left home. It was like something out of one of those sweeping romantic epics on Saturday afternoon television.
Despite her misery, Amber’s sense of the dramatic meant she could see herself in the role of tearstained heroine fleeing from a tyrannical home to the arms of her lover.
Except that Karl clearly hadn’t seen the same movies.
When he’d met her off the bus, he’d hugged her, taken the big suitcase from her and pulled it along, chatting all the while. There was no wild passion at what she’d given up for him, how he’d never forget her leaving her home to be by his side.
‘What is it with women and all this stuff?’ Karl grimaced, pretending he had put his back out hauling her case. ‘How can one small woman own so much? Or is this just the makeup?’
Amber, still torn between tears and defiance, was not in the mood for jokes. She wanted passionate declarations of how he loved her and would take care of her.
But perhaps she mustn’t be too clingy or needy. ‘It’s all my stuff from home,’ she said shortly.
‘Nearly eighteen years of belongings.’ Including her four cuddly toys, although she’d stashed them in a pillowcase.
‘Only slagging you, babe,’ Karl said. ‘Dunno where you’ll put it all, though. The flat’s a bit cramped.’
They reached Karl’s front door. He manfully hauled her case into the rather smelly hallway and up two flights of stairs to a scuffed blue door that stood ajar.
‘We’re having a band meeting,’ Karl said, as he kicked the door of the flat open with his foot.
He left her case in the hall, and pulled her into the cluttered living room that was testimony to a cleaning rota gone very wrong. Old papers and magazines, dirty dishes, empty takeaway containers, ashtrays, items of clothing and dust covered every surface. Kenny T, Lew and Syd were sprawled on the room’s couch and single armchair that were grouped around a coffee table that Amber had never seen without its coat of detritus. In turn, they all got up to hug and welcome her. To her shame, Amber burst into tears. After the huge row with
her mother, it was so lovely to feel welcomed again and not a wayward child.
‘There’s no need to cry,’ Karl said, hugging her.
‘It’s just I’ve never had a real row with my mother before,’ she sobbed into his shoulder. ‘We’ve been there for each other always. Her and me. But she’s so square, she can’t understand this and she never will. You didn’t hear her, Karl: she hates me for this, hates me!’
‘Your ma will get over it. My ma was the same,’
Syd said easily. ‘She never copped on that there’s more to life than exams, you know. Saw me as a lawyer, she did. Jaysus, can you see me in court?’
‘Only in the defence box,’ cracked Lew.
‘You’ll be fine with us, Amber,’ Kenny T added. ‘You can teach Karl how to wash his underpants.
I’ve seen him using the cleanest ones off the floor.’
‘No, I’ve seen you taking my cleanest ones off the floor, you skanger,’ joked Karl in return.
Amber wiped her eyes and tried to join in the joking. She felt absurdly pleased to be welcomed in like one of the boys. Never mind that the place was a pit. She’d show them how to be tidy. It might be nice to be the mother figure for a change.
She’d show her mother that she could survive and be happy. There wasn’t just one way to live your life, by the bloody boring book.
‘Lew was just going to phone out for pizza,’
Karl said to her. ‘But now you’re here, could you cook? We’re mad for some lunch.’
‘We’ve got chicken,’ Lew said hopefully.
‘It smells a bit,’ Syd warned.
‘Nuke it,’ advised Karl. ‘It’ll be fine then, won’t it?’
All eyes turned to Amber, who was a girl and, therefore, would know all about cooking chicken.
Cooking was her mother’s department, Amber realised with a jolt. Hers was reheating or writing things on the list on the fridge, like Out of muesli or Can you get me shampoo?
‘Sure, it’ll be fine,’ she said confidently. How hard could cooking be?
The fridge stank. Syd had been right about the chicken, although he should have just binned it, which was what Amber did.
Nothing else in there would have stretched to a meal for five without a bad dose of salmonella ensuing. There were lots of packets and cartons, but they were mostly empty, with the exception of a half-full orange juice carton which was curdled with age. The freezer box was jammed icily shut and Amber couldn’t prise it open. And the cupboards, stocked with crisps, cereal and lots of nearly empty bottles of booze, yielded nothing but a few stray bits of pasta and rice.
She marched into the band meeting.
‘The chicken is an ex-chicken,’ she announced. ‘I’ll go to the shops and get something for lunch but I need money.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Karl and made a collection.
Amber smiled. She was in charge, what a nice feeling. Last week, she’d been a schoolgirl with a
uniform and a childhood bedroom. Now she lived with a man, shared his bed, cooked his meals.
How was that for progress?
But later afternoon, she started to feel tearful again.
‘I might call Gran,’ sniffed Amber on the phone to Ella.
‘Why?’ Ella couldn’t see the point in this. Any grandmother worth her salt would surely side with Faye’s mother. There would be tears and shouting. ‘Why don’t you call your mother?’ Ella said. ‘She’s the one you should be talking to, not your gran.’
‘My mother will only go on about the bloody exams,’ said Amber bitterly. ‘There’s more to life than exams. It’s a stupid system to put people in little boxes based on how well they do on one particular day when asked one particular set of questions. How does that work out what sort of person you are and what you’re capable of doing?’
For someone who’d been the poster girl for education for all her school life, Amber had honed her arguments against it pretty quickly. She didn’t know how any of her new flatmates had got on in their final-year state exams, but Karl, who had passed his, was always saying that life was the real educator, not school books. She said this, not mentioning that it was Karl-speak.
Ella’s lip curled. ‘The hottest band on the planet all failed their exams, right?’ she said succinctly. ‘Karl is brilliant,’ Amber snapped back.
‘Yeah, well, did he stay in school to finish the year and his exams?’
Amber knew he had. After school, he’d gone to university for two years but had dropped out of his arts degree.
‘But that’s not important,’ she said.
‘Course it is. So he did pass them and now he’s forcing you to skip your exams so you can be with him. Your mother’s right, Amber. Why don’t you finish school properly? It’s only a few weeks away and you’d be wasting years of study for no reason.
If Karl doesn’t want to wait for you until the exams are over, then he doesn’t deserve you.’
‘He loves me,’ said Amber, hurt and angry. ‘I thought you were on my side.’
‘I am. I’m only saying what I think.’
‘Karl would love to wait for me but they’ve got to travel now.’
‘And you can’t stay here, do your exams and join him later?’ Ella demanded. ‘Or are you scared that if you’re not with him, he’ll find someone else to be his muse and keep his bed warm?’
The barb hit home. Amber was glad Ella wasn’t there to see her blush. She knew it was stupid to feel so unsure of Karl after all he’d said to her, but doubt was a sneaky bedfellow and crept into her mind when she least wanted it. She could stay and make up with her mother, but what if Karl left and she never saw him again?
‘We love each other,’ she said coldly to her best friend. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I understand plenty. I understand that you used to listen to me. We shared everything and now Karl’s on the scene, I’m not important any more.
That’s a nice way to treat your closest friend, Amber.’
‘Oh, grow up, Ella,’ snapped Amber. ‘You make it sound like we’re kids again, with nothing to worry about except which My Little Pony is our favourite.’
Ella had had enough. ‘I liked you better then,’
she said. ‘You were still Amber Reid, my best friend ever, and not Amber the dizzy groupie who’s forgotten everything she ever stood for. You were the clever one in school with the future and you’re risking it all to behave like a Ricki Lake Show guest and cling to a loser guy. He’ll dump you, you know. And you’ll ask me why I didn’t stop you. Just so you remember, I did my best. Bye, Amber, have a nice life.’
Amber hung up feeling lonelier than ever. Why didn’t anyone understand?
Love changed you and made you a different person. What was wrong with that?
Why did everyone think she had to choose: them or Karl? Couldn’t she have both?
The card was nothing but a rectangle of fine cream paper, folded over, with a heart hand-drawn on the front, and on the inside written in Grey’s unmistakable copperplate handwriting: I love you. I miss you, please come home.
Maggie reread the card yet again, then traced her fingers over the writing reverentially. A shopbought one wouldn’t have touched her but this, this gesture of love, made her ache with wanting to go back to Grey.
She’d been thinking about what Christie Devlin had said earlier, and then she’d come home from work to find this on the bundle of post on the hall table, a card from Grey wanting her back.
Stop thinking of how everyone else would live your life in your shoes. You have to live it, Christie had said to both her and Faye.
And she’d been right. Maggie hadn’t been able to get the words out of her head.
She wanted to go back to Grey, that was all
that mattered. Not what anyone else said. Not her pride or fear or lack of trust. It could all be worked through. What had happened had changed her, so their relationship wouldn’t go back to the way it had been before: it would be better, stronger. Like her.
It was half seven in the evening and Grey would certainly be home from work. She desperately wanted to speak to him now.
She dialled the apartment but got their answering machine, still with its message saying that neither Grey nor Maggie could come to the phone right now. She hung up without leaving a message. This conversation had to be in person.
Next, she dialled his mobile but it was switched off.
Damn. She felt so wound up. She wanted to talk to someone …
‘Hi, how are you?’ she said, when Shona answered the phone.
‘Great,’ said Shona breezily.
There was a lot of noise going on in Shona and Paul’s flat. The noise of two people who knew how to enjoy themselves and weren’t worried about bothering the neighbours by having the stereo turned up to This May Damage Your Hearing level. ‘I just wanted to talk,’ Maggie said.
‘Serious talk?’ asked Shona.
‘No, not really.’ She paused. ‘Yeah, serious talk.’ ‘Turn the music down,’ Shona yelled.
‘So what happened?’ demanded Shona, when the noise level dropped slightly. ‘He turned up on your doorstep, confessed undying love and promised never to be a naughty boy again.’
‘How did you know?’ Maggie asked. She hadn’t spoken to Shona since Grey had turned up to see her.
,You mean he did?’ said Shona. ‘Talk about Cliche City.’
‘I didn’t know he’d come,’ Maggie said.
‘Well,’ said Shona, ‘it’s just the sort of thing a man like Grey would do. Bonk somebody else on your bed, not know how to say sorry properly, let you run away while he thought about it and then rush into your arms and bleat, “I’m sorry darling, it will never happen again”, because he realises it’s very boring doing your own washing and cleaning.
And besides which, it’s against faculty rules to screw your students and his college career would be finito if word leaked out. Not that myself or anyone in the library would say anything, no.’
Shona sounded gleeful. ‘Silent as the grave we are.
Gossip never touches our lips - we spit it out so fast, it never gets to touch our lips.’
Maggie had felt cheerful a moment before but Shona’s analysis of Grey’s behaviour made it all sound so sordid and miserable. Not so much a great passion as a tawdry fling.