Just Between Us (7 page)

Naturally, the generous Joan did offer to design an outfit for Holly.

‘I can see you in a space-age, semi-Edwardian bondage look; a comment about school in general,’ Joan said, sketching on a bit of an old envelope. Somebody had given her a video of the director’s cut of Blade Runner and she had got a bit carried away with visions of the future.

‘Space-age, semi-Edwardian bondage!’ groaned Kenny, who lived with Joan, though not as a couple, as they both constantly informed everyone. Kenny was gay, worked in a designer men’s boutique, devoured
Vogue
as his bedtime reading and wished Joan would give up being avant garde so she could worship at the altar of designer Tom Ford, Kenny’s greatest idol. They made ideal flatmates because they could argue endlessly about fashion and, together, they could afford the pretty flat with the balcony that neither
would be able to afford on their own. ‘Holly wants to make all her classmates pea green with envy,’ Kenny insisted. ‘Not make them laugh at her. Six-stone fourteen-year-old models from Eastern Europe with cheekbones like razors can wear that type of thing but on anybody else, it looks ridiculous. What Holly wants is something…,’ Kenny paused dramatically, ‘
fabulous
. And credit-card droppingly expensive.’

Bunny, practical as ever, had come up with a suitably fabulous outfit which hadn’t involved any credit-card action. Holly would never be able to thank her enough. Encased in her borrowed finery – Holly had promised Bunny she wouldn’t spoil the effect by telling anyone it wasn’t actually hers – even someone as self-critical as Holly had to admit that she looked OK. Well, reasonable. Passable. All she needed to do was not spill anything on herself.

Satisfied that her nails were dry, Holly stood up and took a deep breath before attempting to bend down and put on her boots. After what felt like ages, she zipped them both up and stood up, gulping in air like a deep-sea pearl diver.

She stood in front of the mirror, gave her hair one last brushing, and then picked up her handbag. She’d have killed for a cigarette but Gabriella would go ballistic if the corset came back smelling of Marlboro Lights, so she’d had her last one before she got dressed. How she’d stay off the fags tonight, she didn’t know, but she had to. It was a small price to pay. Holly practised her tough-but-sexy look in the mirror again. She even tried her Lauren Bacall, lowered eyes, look (Holly adored Lauren), but gloomily decided that the effect was more Bogie than Bacall. It was time to go. Holly had arranged to meet her friend at the train, take her for a drink, and then travel to the hotel in time for Donna to check in and change. What she hadn’t mentioned to Donna was that this plan would make them fashionably late for the reunion. That had been Bunny’s suggestion.

‘Make an entrance,’ Bunny had advised. ‘You don’t want
to be hanging around aimlessly waiting for the party to get going. Arrive twenty minutes late and you’ll look as if you’re far too busy to get to things on time.’

Caroline and Lilli had made a cosy corner of the hotel bar their own, with handbags and jackets marking the spot and a double vodka barely diluted with Diet Coke in front of each of them for Dutch courage. The reunion was taking place in an annexed corner of the hotel restaurant, but the committee hadn’t been able to arrange a private area of the bar, so Caroline and Lilli had come down early to pick a suitable spot for their gang. Even ten years after they’d left Cardinal School, they still thought of their schoolmates as ‘their gang’. Of course, their lives had moved on a lot since then. Caroline had three small children and was a leading light in the Kinvarra Drama Society. Lilli had two little girls and worked part time. Sasha, another gangette, was assistant manager in the local video shop. The other girls, including TV star Michelle, had moved from Kinvarra, and were home rarely, which was why tonight was going to be so exciting: to see how well everyone had done. Lilli and Caroline knew that reunions weren’t really about meeting up with old friends – they were about chalking up the successes and failures of their peers.

Lilli consulted her list. ‘Twenty-five yeses, three nos and two who didn’t reply,’ she said. ‘That’s not a bad tally.’

‘I wonder if Michelle’s had any work done,’ Caroline said, getting stuck into her drink.

‘Definitely not,’ said Lilli knowledgeably. ‘Michelle was always naturally pretty. Her eyebrows are done properly now, that’s it. I don’t believe in plastic surgery myself.’

‘Me neither, of course,’ agreed Caroline, who cherished a long-range plan of having her eyes lifted before they got baggy like her elder sister’s.

‘You shouldn’t tamper with nature,’ Lilli continued, holding her glass with fingers tipped with rock-hard acrylic nails. ‘These don’t count,’ she added hastily, noticing Caroline’s
eyes on the acrylic tips. ‘You can’t have decent nails when you’ve got small children.’

A lone woman entered the bar, looking round nervously and clutching a small handbag. Short and thin, she was not dressed in the frontline of fashion and her dark, un-styled hair hung limply to her shoulders. Caroline and Lilli surveyed her.

‘Brona Reilly,’ Lilli whispered to Caroline. ‘She hasn’t changed a bit.’

‘You’d think she’d have made more of an effort for tonight,’ Caroline whispered back. She and Lilli had pulled out all the stops and had made a trip to the city to check out wildly expensive, fashionable looks they could copy. They’d both had their hair and make-up done professionally for the night and Caroline, though she hadn’t told Lilli, had even had a seaweed wrap in Kinvarra’s poshest beauty salon in order to lose a few inches. Her corset-style dress was very unforgiving round the middle.

They pretended they hadn’t seen Brona and watched her go hesitantly up to the bar and order a drink. The reunion might have been about meeting people, but it was important that they were the
right
people.

Brona had been one of the people that the girls in Michelle’s gang had ignored. Mind you, so had Donna, who was now a friend of theirs. But that was different.

Any mild guilt over how they’d once treated Donna had vanished, because Donna herself didn’t seem to remember it. When Caroline, Lilli and Donna had accidentally met up three years ago at the school gates on the children’s first day, there hadn’t been any bad feeling at all.

‘Imagine, three little girls the same age,’ Donna had sighed. ‘They can go to school and be friends like us.’

Caroline, who was more thoughtful than Lilli, blushed at this, remembering how the more popular girls like herself used to ignore the school mice like Donna except when they wanted to copy their homework. Now that she was a mother herself, Caroline would have personally ripped apart any
child who dared to ignore her own beloved Kylie. But Donna clearly had no bad memories of either school or Caroline and Lilli. All was happily forgotten.

‘Would you like to have coffee in my house when we drop the girls off?’ Caroline had said quickly that day, wanting to make amends.

‘That would be lovely,’ Donna smiled.

And that had been the start of their friendship. But despite three years of trying to get them together, Donna had never managed to reintroduce them to Holly.

Both Lilli and Caroline were eager to see what Holly looked like now. Her sister was famous and they were keen to see if any of the gloss of Tara Miller had rubbed off on her. Tara was in the papers occasionally, and had been photographed at several high-profile premieres. Consequently, Holly was more interesting than she had been when she was just one of the quiet, mousy girls in school. Fame by association was better than no fame at all.

Donna revealed that Holly lived in a fabulous apartment in Dublin, had a wonderful job in Lee’s and partied like mad. She also said that Holly looked like a million dollars. Caroline and Lilli, remembering the plump shy girl with the round, earnest face, wanted to see this for themselves.

Donna was frantic by the time she and Holly pulled up outside the hotel at five past eight. ‘We’re so late,’ she shrieked, leaping out of the cab and thrusting a tenner into Holly’s hand. ‘Here’s my share. I have to check in. We were supposed to be here at half seven, the meal will have started five minutes ago and I’ve still got to get changed…’ She fled up the hotel steps into the lobby.

‘What’s the rush?’ said the taxi driver chattily as Holly paid him. ‘When God made time, he made plenty of it. And it’s Christmas: no party starts on time at Christmas. I’d say you’d be lucky if you get your dinner by ten tonight, never mind by eight.’

Holly smiled at him. ‘My sentiments exactly.’ Bunny’s plan for being late had been a good one. When Holly had picked Donna up from the train station and taken her for a pre-reunion drink, she’d assured her that they’d get a taxi to the party and be there in five minutes. Pre-Christmas traffic, driving rain and the mayhem of late-night shopping combined to make it more like forty minutes.

‘Thanks a million,’ Holly said, climbing out of the cab and slamming the door. She moved away and realised that her scarf had got stuck. The driver began to drive off.

‘Stop!’ roared Holly in panic. He slammed on the brakes.

Naturally, her scarf had somehow infiltrated the door locking mechanism and it took five minutes of fervent dragging to disentangle it.

‘Thanks again,’ she said weakly, holding the frayed ends of the scarf and hoping that she could cut off the destroyed bits. At least it hadn’t been the corset.

In the hotel, Donna had checked in and was about to race up to her room to leap into her party dress when Holly appeared. ‘Come on!’ she yelled at Holly.

While Donna’s hysteria mounted as she snagged tights and spilt glitter powder on her dress instead of on her shoulders, Holly sat in a chair by the window and looked out onto the wet streets wondering why she’d come in the first place.

‘Let’s go.’ Donna was ready, still panting from her last-minute rush.

Holly got to her feet, both the corset and her new boots creaking ominously.

She shook back her hair and breathed as deeply as was possible with several hundred pounds’ worth of designer corset glued to her.

‘I’m ready,’ she said.

‘That’s a fabulous outfit,’ grumbled Donna as they went downstairs. ‘I hate this old dress. You look great and I look like I’ve been out milking the cows all day and only stopped ten minutes ago to get dressed.’

‘You don’t have cows,’ pointed out Holly, smiling at Donna’s mad logic. ‘And you look great.’

‘You know what I mean. You have that city gloss about you and I look like a bumpkin.’

‘No you don’t. And I borrowed this,’ Holly confided, breaking her promise to Bunny. ‘I was so scared that I’d look awful and the rest of them would think I’d never changed from being boring, fat old Holly Miller.’

‘But you look beautiful,’ said Donna in astonishment. ‘You’ve looked great for years. Haven’t you got a fabulous life and everything? What have you to feel scared about?’

‘Are you on drugs?’ demanded Holly, mystified as to how her friend had this inaccurate view of her life. ‘I don’t have a fabulous life, I work in a shop, I live in a flat I can’t afford, if I didn’t do overtime, I’d never be able to pay the electricity bill and my last date was a disaster.’

‘How am I supposed to know these things if you don’t tell me?’ said Donna crossly.

‘I’m sick telling you but you’re convinced I’m lying. You seem to think that living away from Kinvarra is like magic dust that transforms your life. It doesn’t.’

Donna stopped walking. ‘Right, so. We won’t mention this, though. I told the girls that you were getting on brilliantly and had men coming out your ears.’

Holly goggled at this. ‘You did what?’

‘I thought you were having a great time. Ah forget it, we’ll say nothing. Caroline and Lilli are great fun, you know,’ she added.

‘I don’t know.’ Holly was ready to confide all her fears now that she’d started. ‘I never talked to them at school, they looked down on us for being quiet.’

‘We were our own worst enemies at school, Holly,’ said Donna firmly. ‘We should have joined in more. That’s why I’m pals with Caroline and Lilli now. I don’t want Emily to grow up being all quiet and mousy like us. She plays with Caroline and Lilli’s girls and when they’re older, they’ll look after her. Nobody will call my daughter Speccy.’

So Donna
had
remembered. Holly stared at her friend. ‘And all this time I thought you were suffering from selective memory syndrome.’

Donna grinned. ‘No, I’ve just reinvented myself. Like Madonna. I’m making up for lost time. Come on.’

Caroline and Lilli were on their third double each. The bar was humming and they’d been mingling like mad, but there was still no sign of Michelle.

‘Stupid bitch,’ said Lilli crossly. ‘I always said she was unreliable. And where’s that Donna?’

‘She’s here,’ crowed Caroline. ‘And omigod who’s that with her?’

They watched in astonishment as Donna arrived, breathless as usual, accompanied by this tall, voluptuously stunning woman, wearing what looked suspiciously like the original version of Caroline’s corset. The woman’s dark hair fell gloriously around her shoulders, as glossy as if several catwalk hairdressers had been slaving over it for hours.

She
hadn’t needed a seaweed wrap to squeeze her body into the corset; like a modern-day Sophia Loren, her figure was a natural hourglass, with a waspy waist that was surely narrower than one of Caroline’s thighs. Caroline, who’d put on a stone since her school days, wished she’d stopped her mid-morning Mars bar now.

The dark-haired woman was carrying an exquisite beaded handbag and her necklace was definitely the same one that Posh Spice had been wearing in
Hello!
Confidence oozed out of her like expensive moisturiser out of Estée Lauder radiance pearls.

‘It’s Holly Miller,’ said Lilli, awestruck.

Donna rushed up to her two new best friends, who clambered out of their corner to greet her and Holly. This was true reunion gold. Looking round the room, most people looked almost the same as at school, just with better highlights, real jewellery and more expensive clothes. Pat Wilson had had her long dark hair cut into a bob, Andrea Maguire’s
red hair was now dyed a startling blonde, and even Babs Grafton had finally had her teeth fixed and sported contacts instead of heavy glasses. But Holly was totally different, like someone who’d just stepped out of one of those six-month make-over things on the telly.