‘Not as much fun as telling him I don’t need him,’ said Maggie firmly.
‘Good for you. When are you going to do it?’
Maggie took the last chocolate. ‘Tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell him tonight.’
‘I’ve got some chocolate-covered biscuits in the kitchen,’ Faye said. ‘I quite fancy one of them.
What do you think?’
‘Good plan,’ said Maggie. Then are nothing but trouble. We should stick to chocolate. It’s safer.’
When she left Faye’s house, Maggie walked across Summer Street to the park. Its cast-iron gates would close in half an hour but there were still plenty of people enjoying the summer evening.
She headed for the pavilion and climbed the old wooden steps to sit on one of the built-in benches that overlooked the tiny fountain.
Birds sang to one another in the trees overhead, and there were giggles coming from the group of girls huddled on the benches beside the playground.
Normal life went on no matter what personal disaster you were living through, she thought, taking out her mobile.
Grey answered the apartment phone quickly.
‘Maggie, hello,’ he said warmly.
‘Hi, Grey,’ she said, her voice flat. She still didn’t feel angry. Her anger seemed to have deserted her and her main emotion was sadness at seeing how hollow her life with Grey had turned out to be. ‘I don’t want us to get back together, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t work.’
‘What?’ ‘It’s over. I can’t go hack.’
‘But Maggie, you want to, you know that. I love you and you love me. That’s all that matters.
We can get over what happened. We could have couples’ therapy,’ he volunteered, which made her smile wryly. Grey was proud of the workings of his own mind but would hate to have a third party probe it and question his beliefs.
‘I don’t want therapy,’ Maggie stated. ‘I want to sell the apartment and move on. You could buy me out, if you’d like. It’s a good apartment and I don’t want it. I’m not sure if I want to move back to Galway at all.’
She had friends there but a total break would help her more. The whole city was filled with memories of the past five years.
‘We can start again, Maggie. We can move apartments, get married, do all the things I said.’ He sounded earnest and Maggie’s feeling of sadness grew. How easily he lied. And how easily she’d believed it all.
‘I want to be with someone I can trust, Grey,’
she said, ‘and you’re not that person. It’s not easy
doing this. I feel like I’m wasting five years of my life …’
‘You are!’ he cried. ‘You can’t give up on us that easily.’
‘I’m not the one giving up,’ Maggie replied. ‘You are. Because you lied to me about how you’d never cheated before and now I know that’s not true.
There have been other women. Don’t try to deny it. Shona told me. It’s no secret apparently, except to me, that you’ve had other women.’
‘Why does she have to interfere?’ he growled. ‘That’s not interfering, that’s telling a friend the truth,’ Maggie said. ‘I can’t live that way any more, Grey. You’ve cheated on me, not with one woman, but with at least four - who knows how many?
So you’re the one who’s ending our relationship.
You made the choice to sleep with other women.
Not me.’
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
She wondered if he’d lie again or confess. What would the politician in him do?
‘It was stupid,’ he said finally. ‘I have no excuse, Maggie. None whatsoever. But it will never happen again, I promise. Please come home. I love you.’
Maggie wiped her eyes but once the tears started to flow, she couldn’t stop them running down her cheeks.
‘You just don’t love me enough, Grey,’ she said. ‘I won’t accept second best. I’m sorry. I’ll call again about the apartment but don’t call me. It’s over Believe me. I won’t change my mind.’
And without giving him a chance to beg, she hung up.
The birds singing in the trees didn’t take any notice of the woman sobbing silently on the pavilion. Neither did the teenage girls chattering and texting furiously on the opposite side of the park.
They probably still believe in true love, Maggie reflected, watching them through blurry eyes.
She wished she could warn them, but there were some things you had to experience yourself.
Mum and Dad were in the kitchen watching a film when she got home. It was National Lampoon’s European Vacation and the Griswold family were touring Europe, leaving mayhem and bewilderment in their wake.
‘Sit down, Bean,’ said Dad, wiping the tears from his eyes. ‘This is hilarious. You used to love it.,
Maggie pulled up a chair, settled the cushion on it, and sat down.
‘Did you have any dinner?’ asked her mother. ‘Yes,’ fibbed Maggie. She’d had chocolate biscuits after all. She didn’t feel up to eating anything else now and her mother would be bound to start fussing if Maggie had said no.
‘I’ll make us a pot of tea,’ Dad said, patting her knee. ‘Isn’t this nice? It’s like old times, isn’t it, Una?’
‘Yes,’ sighed Mum happily.
Maggie looked at her parents with love. It wasn’t what she’d planned to be doing when she was thirty - back living with her mum and dad, boyfriendless, and with her confidence shot to pieces. But it must have all happened for a reason.
Faye wasn’t letting circumstances stop her in her tracks: she was going to find Amber and try to make sense of the past. And that’s what Maggie had to do too. If this was what a new life was all about, then she was going to give it her best shot.
On the plane, Faye sat in an aisle seat and watched her fellow passengers board. She had a fat magazine on her lap, but the scenes playing out in front of her were far more intriguing than anything else.
An older couple walked down the aisle slowly, resigned expressions on their faces at such a long flight ahead. A large group of teenage schoolgirls in some kind of sports strip arrived in a frenzy of excitement, already discussing swapping seats for maximum fun.
‘Girls, you’re supposed to sit in your correct seat,’ said one of the harassed adults with them, either a teacher or a parent, already, Faye reckoned, realising that they’d bitten off more than they could chew.
‘Oh, a baby, how cute!’ one of the girls said, and the woman in the opposite row with an infant on her lap smiled weakly because at least she’d be surrounded by people who wouldn’t object to the poor child’s crying.
It had been years since Faye had been on a plane on her own. It was nice, she decided. Freeing, There was nobody to worry about but herself.
Nobody could reach her on her mobile phone with bad news; nobody needed her.
For the first time since Amber had left, Faye felt a strange sense of acceptance at being alone.
Amber would have left home inevitably and Faye would never have been ready for it. She could see that now. Her world was too tied up with her daughter, which hadn’t, it turned out, been the right thing for either of them.
Faye ate the airline meal, watched the movie, then stuck in earplugs, pulled on a homemade lavender-filled eyemask Christie had given her for exactly that purpose and went to sleep.
The midtown hotel where her taxi pulled up was part of a budget chain and looked nothing like the adorable boutique hotels that the airline magazine had mentioned glowingly as places to stay in New York. Here, she reckoned the concierge wouldn’t be able to whisk tickets for a Broadway show our of thin air. However, the marble lobby was clean and the whole place felt safe to Faye. Her room was a tiny twin on the seventh floor, with a microscopic bathroom and a mini kitchen that consisted of a kettle, toaster, microwave and sink, cunningly concealed behind one cupboard.
Faye double-locked the door, stripped off ad climbed into bed for another hour’s rest.
It was mid-afternoon when she woke up and she stood at the window looking out over the city.
She couldn’t see much but other buildings, and directly below, she was staring at a grimy rooftop where somebody had once put a few wooden deckchairs, then forgotten about them.
But never mind the view, this was New York. She wasn’t the victim any more, she was doing something, taking her power back, as Ellen, the makeover lady, had said. Ellen had a point, Faye realised. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her power. Not any more.
In the lobby, she sat at a public phone and fed in her credit card. She couldn’t afford the hotelroom charges, but down here, the price was pretty standard. It took seven calls to track down the production company who were supposed to be working on Karl’s album with the band, Ceres.
Then an interminable wait followed as a bored young guy searched for details of the band’s schedule, saying all the time: ‘I can’t give you inside information, lady, this is only public domain stuff.
If you’re a stalker, I’m not taking the rap.’
‘Do many unsigned bands have stalkers?’ Faye demanded. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. I told you, I’m Amber Reid’s mother, she’s Karl Evans’s partner, and I have an urgent message for her.’
He didn’t reply for a minute, then said: ‘They did a gig at the O’Reilly Tavern recently, and that’s all I have written down here because Sly was supposed to go to it. That’s all I can help you with.’
‘But they’re recording an album and your company are producing it. I can leave a message for them, surely?’ said Faye, who planned on just turning up and surprising them but wasn’t going to tell this guy so.
‘They were,’ the guy said, and she could hear him flipping pages, ‘but they’re not down in the log any more. Doesn’t say why.’ More pages flipped. ‘Not down for next month neither.’
‘How could that be?’ asked Faye, confused. ‘Hey lady, it’s all about dollars. If you can’t pay, you can’t stay. Guess whatever deal they had fell through. If they’re good enough, Sly and Maxi will produce your album for a percentage deal. If you’re not and nobody else is paying, it’s hasta la vista.’
‘Oh,’ she said in horror, her only lead gone.
Her anxiety finally transmitted itself to the guy on the other end of the phone.
‘All right. They were staying in the Arizona Fish Hotel over beside the Port Authority,’ he said. ‘You didn’t hear it from me, OK?’
‘Bless you,’ said Faye with gratitude.
It was the sight of the Arizona Fish Hotel that made Faye begin to feel really worried. Her own hotel was hardly a palace, but it was Trump Tower compared to this run-down place with its tawdry cloak of hip.
It might have boasted a lobby full of retro chic furniture and framed yellowing sheet music of hit songs allegedly penned in the penthouse suite, but Faye could see the seediness seeping from the walls.
No amount of trendy furniture or psychedelic prints on the walls, or even the neon sign for the hotel’s own nightclub, A Fish, could hide the dirt.
It reminded her of The Club in her previous life: a dump dressed up as a cool hang-out by virtue of the fact that some band or other played there once, partying till the LSD or the heroin was gone. Not that she’d ever travelled anywhere with TJ, but she knew that if she had, she’d have loved the decayed glamour of the Arizona Fish. To a girl like Amber, raised in the quiet of Summer Street, hearing of the songs allegedly written in room seven, or the bed that had probably fallen through the roof in room eleven during an unbelievable party after a rock festival, would have made her feel a part of it all. This was excitement, this was life. And she was in the middle of it.
Faye knew exactly how excited Amber would be to be living this life, because she’d been just as excited twenty years ago to find herself in the world of The Club. But that life was like being in the eye of the storm. You thought you were safe, untouchable, when the storm was actually raging inches away. Then, nobody could have told Faye Reid that. She’d had to find it out for herself.
Faye wanted to get her daughter out of that storm before it hurt her. She wouldn’t stop searching for Amber until she found her. And if
she had to stay in New York for ever, she would.
She’d get Amber back.
Amber looked at the cockroach and the cockroach looked back calmly. It wasn’t as big as a rat, as some people claimed they were in this part of Utah, but she wouldn’t have minded a rat. Furry was infinitely preferable to scuttling, crackly insects.
Breathing deeply, she backed out of the room, past Karl and the man with the dirty T-shirt, and stood in the hallway, feeling her skin crawl.
‘I am not sleeping in there,’ she said.
The man moved into the room, banged about a bit, and emerged smiling.
‘He is gone, you can go in now.’
‘Where is he gone?’ demanded Amber, looking around the floor in the hallway with distaste. ‘Into the corner he hides in with his eight million relatives until we’re in bed asleep and he comes out to dance the Macarena?’
‘No Macarena. He is gone,’ the man repeated. ‘It’s all we can afford,’ said Karl, sighing and hauling his stuff into the room. He’d stopped hauling Amber’s stuff days ago.
It was hard to imagine that she’d once felt that the Arizona Fish Hotel was a bit on the grubby side, Amber thought wryly. The Arizona’s dust balls and smeary windows were nothing to the squalor of this joint, a place where health inspectors clearly feared to tread.
Karl was right: it was all they could afford. The band were travelling across the country in a yenta-wreck van, which was the cheapest way to get them all to LA, and staying in the most inexpensive motels around. This way, Karl had worked out, they’d have enough money to survive in LA for a few months in order to set up another production deal with somebody hot.
‘Screw Stevie,’ Syd muttered every day they climbed into the van and set off on the interstate.
The suspension was not what it might have been and it took a while each day to get used to the bumpiness of the ride.
‘Like a roller coaster,’ said Lew the drummer happily.
‘You must have a stomach of steel,’ Syd replied in disgust.
When Demon had decided against producing the band’s album, Stevie’s big talk had dried up along with the meals out and the free-flowing booze.