River Deep (2 page)

‘Yes, dear, I thought a change would be nice, don’t you?’

Sarah cast an eye over Mrs Billingham’s fine hair, drained and thinned by years of colour and permanent curls, and wondered if it could stand a semi-permanent colour wash let alone anything more spectacular. She leaned over the back of the chair, bringing her cheek level with Mrs Billingham’s and, lowering her voice a little, caught her gaze in the mirror. ‘The thing is, love, these colours aren’t included in the pensioner’s special. I mean, you’re right, you’d look a treat, but the colours alone would set you back fifty quid. If you’ve got that to spare then fine, otherwise I can do a nice set and colour rinse for a fiver. What do you say?’

Mrs Billingham’s face fell. ‘It’s a terrible thing being old and impoverished, dear. Fifty years I worked, and for what? Don’t even see my son any more.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Go on then, a nice set and colour rinse will have to do.’

Sarah bit her lip, feeling a pang of guilt even though she’d knocked three quid off her usual pensioner rates.

‘Mum! Phone!’ Sarah turned to reply to her fourteen-year-old daughter only to find she had already headed back to the flat upstairs, leaving the door marked ‘Private’ swinging in her wake. Good morning, Becca, and how
are
you? she mumbled under her breath.

‘Luce!’

The junior raised her head from the five-minute job of sorting the colours that she had so far managed to make last all morning. ‘Get Mrs Billingham washed, all right?’ Sarah asked her, and headed for the stairs up to her flat. She couldn’t think who would be calling her on the flat number during the day. Everyone knew she’d be working. It must be creditors or her mother or someone else equally terrifying. Becca had tossed the handset onto the sofa and returned to her bedroom, leaving the TV blaring to an empty room.

‘Hello?’ Sarah waited for the reply and then realised who it was. ‘
Maggie! Hello!
’ she bellowed, picturing her friend jumping out of her reverie at the other end of the line. ‘I’m at work, you should have called me in the shop.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Maggie said at her end. ‘I forgot. What’s Becca doing at home, anyway? It is a Wednesday, isn’t it? Or have I totally lost it?’

Sarah listened carefully to the tone of her voice. She seemed reasonably composed: calm, if mildly distracted.

‘Summer holidays, or Purgatory for Parents as I like to call it. So, um, what can I do for you? It’s just that I’ve got Mrs—’ Maggie’s sob tore down the phone line and battered Sarah’s ear drum before she could pull it away.

‘It’s just … I can’t stand it! I can’t stand any of it, Sarah. This bloody pub, Mum and Dad, my stupid bloody brother and the … and the … the fact that he’s gone. Christen’s gone and I just can’t … can you come over? Now?’

Sarah thought about her pensioners, her Wednesday morning bread and butter, and wondered if Jackie and Luce could cope by themselves. And then she realised they’d have to. In all the years they’d known each other, Maggie had always come to her when she’d got in a mess, across the country sometimes and in the middle of the night. The very least she could do was get across town.

‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes, all right?’

Maggie continued to sob regardless.

‘OK, well, I’m hanging up now, so I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You can put the phone down now,’ she added.

As she picked up her car keys, Sarah gave a cursory knock on her daughter’s door before opening it.

‘Mum!’ Becca squealed a generic protest.

‘I’m going out, all right. Keep an eye on your brother.’

Becca looked as though she’d just been handed a death sentence. ‘But I’m going out …’ she began.

‘It’s an emergency, OK? You want to be treated as an adult, then act like one.’ Sarah winced as she heard herself trot out the same words her mother used to bludgeon her with as a girl, and which she had sworn she would never use on her own kids.

‘Aunty Maggie blubbing is
not
an emergency,’ Becca said blithely, turning her face away as her mother tried to kiss her. ‘It’s been a daily bloody occurrence for the last two weeks. I don’t know why it’s taking her so long to pull herself together. I wouldn’t let that old git Christian make me so bloody sad all the time!’

In the back of her mind Sarah knew Becca was unleashing her level-two swearing to try and keep her there for a few minutes longer, even if it was just for a fight. For once she’d have to let her get away with it.

‘It
is
bloody sad,’ she said to Becca as she shut the flat door and headed down into the salon. ‘Bloody fucking sad.’

‘My God, this is the Blue Peter time capsule.’ Sarah looked around her at Maggie’s old bedroom. The only room on the top floor of her parents’ pub, it was small, with a sloping ceiling in which a dormer window was set. The narrow single bed on which Maggie was currently huddled was pushed up against a wall papered in pink and patterned with white love hearts. Sarah smiled to herself remembering the day Maggie had dragged her up the many stairs to look at her new decor.

‘Finally, Mum and Dad have let me have something modern,’ Maggie had said proudly. ‘It’s skill, isn’t it?’

How old were they then? Eleven maybe? Twelve at the oldest. Layered over the paper was poster after poster, ranging from A-ha to Bon Jovi to Take That.

‘Ha! Take That! Do you remember us pretending to fancy them ironically, but actually we fancied them totally and screamed like babies when we went to see them? How old were we then? Twenty-three?’

Sarah looked at Maggie, whose head was buried between her knees, and realised that maybe now wasn’t the best time to be talking over old times. She sat down on the bed and took hold of Maggie’s hand. The summer had arrived with full force the day that Maggie and Christian had split up. For two weeks there hadn’t been even a hint of rain, and the room felt like an oven. Sarah longed to open the window, but instead she spoke soothingly to Maggie.

‘Come on, baby,’ she said, remembering how she used to soothe Becca before Becca grew prickles and became allergic to her mother’s touch. She pulled Maggie into her arms. ‘Come on, talk to me.’

Maggie lifted her head and roughly wiped her tears away with the heel of her hand. Her large brown eyes were bloodshot, and ringed darkly with grey, which made a stark contrast against her pale skin.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry …’ Maggie began. As she talked, she felt her breathing slowly begin to even out and the edges of the room creep back into focus. ‘It’s just everything, you know? It’s this bloody time-capsule room where everything, including my life, stands still, it’s Mum and Dad always looking at me and Mum trying to talk to me, and I know she means well but if she thinks bloody ylang-ylang and positive affirmations are going to help …’ Maggie felt her voice rise hysterically and she took a deep breath. ‘It’s not having anything to do, not really. I mean, Mum said I could work in the bar, but Jesus, I did that for pin money when I was a student.’

‘You’ll find another job in no time, with your experience,’ Sarah tried to console her.

‘I know, I know I could find a job, but then if I did it’d be in catering and I know everyone in catering, and they’ll all know what’s happened, and anyway, even if that didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It wouldn’t be the same as running my own business. Building something up from scratch. With someone I love.’

Maggie uncurled herself and leaned her back against the wall. ‘Fuck,’ she said simply. ‘I’m fucked, and that’s all there is to it.’

Sarah leaned back next to her.

‘I know, shall we smoke a fag out of the window?’ she said, nudging Maggie gently in the ribs, dying for a breath of smoke-polluted fresh air. ‘I mean, I know we’re thirty-two and can smoke where we like, but as it’s permanently 1987 in here, out of the window would be more, you know, nostalgic.’ She proffered Maggie the packet, more for a joke than anything else, and then covered her surprise as her non-smoking friend took a cigarette, lit it, hauled herself off the bed and opened the window.

‘You know,’ Maggie said over her shoulder as she leaned out, ‘it wasn’t because I was worried about Mum and Dad catching us that I made us smoke out of the window – they’d have been “cool” with it. It was because I thought they were so embarrassing with all their bloody “permissive” parenting. I wanted them to be more like your mum, you know, the kind of parents that forced you to hide your disco clothes in a Tesco bag until you got half a mile down the road. Not the sort that had sex in the middle of a muddy field with a few thousand other people. When I was a kid I used to pray to be sent to a boarding school, like Trebizon or Mallory Towers or something. I couldn’t stand it here, couldn’t wait to get out of here and make my own life, get married, have my own kids. Force them to brush their teeth and do their homework instead of saying, “life is full of choices, Maggie, and they are all yours to make.” ’

She stubbed the half-smoked cigarette out in an empty coffee cup – something which, in a woman who was almost compulsively tidy and neat, Sarah considered to be borderline psychosis – and continued. ‘Which is bloody bollocks, anyhow, because I didn’t
choose
to be back here in my parents’ pub, with my as-good-as-useless brother still living off them, still wandering about like an aimless halfwit. I didn’t
choose
for Christian to leave me. I didn’t
choose
any of this, but I’ve got it and I just can’t see where I go from here, Sarah. I just can’t see what to do.’

‘Listen.’ Sarah crossed the small room and stood in the square pool of sunlit warmth. ‘I know that right now things seem as if they’ll never get better – believe me, I’ve been there more times than I care to mention – but things will get better. It’s only been a couple of weeks. You haven’t had a chance to sort things out yet, you haven’t let it all sink in. And what you were saying about my mum … Have you forgotten she threw me out at eighteen because she wouldn’t have a pregnant girl bringing shame on the house? I never see her, I never speak to her and she lives two miles away. At least your parents are here for you. They
love
you, Mags, even if they are a bit flaky. And at least you’ve got a roof over your head and a way of earning some cash until you get back on your feet.’

Sarah reached out and tucked her friend’s dark hair behind one ear.

‘What you need, apart from some coppertone lowlights and some
really
good concealer is a plan. You need to get some direction, move things on a bit.’ Sarah paused cautiously. ‘You need to see Christian, Mags. You’ve got money in that business and in the flat. You have to be practical, get what’s yours and move on. It’s the only way, mate, trust me.’

Maggie rubbed her hands across her face and ran them anxiously through her hair. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. He keeps leaving me messages on my mobile saying we’ve got to sort out the practicalities, but he sounds so normal, he sounds as if he’s ordering vegetables. Like
this
hasn’t touched him at all. I want to see him, but not like this …’ She stopped. ‘But I know, I know I have to.’

Sarah nodded and checked her watch.

‘Mate, I’ve got to go, I’ve got a full head of colour in twenty minutes. Listen, I’ll come with you when you see him, if you like. I could thump him for you, kick him in the bollocks? Or make derogatory remarks about his sexual prowess?’

Maggie half laughed before suffering a split-second but entirely vivid memory of Christian making love to her. She forced the image out of her mind with a small shake of her head.

‘No, don’t worry, I’ll do it on my own.’ She didn’t want to tell Sarah that the last thing she wanted was someone there to keep her together. She didn’t want to be together, she wanted him to see what he’d done, to realise how wrong he was. She wanted a chance to change his mind.

Sarah scrutinised her briefly and then nodded.

‘All right then, but if I remember rightly, the appropriate time-capsule way of dealing with a broken heart is two extralarge slabs of Dairy Milk and two bottles of Blue Nun before a night on the town. My nan’s got the kids on Friday, so you and me are going out, and we’ll go shopping in my lunch hour and I’ll do your hair first, no arguments. Agreed?’ Sarah ignored Maggie’s terrified look. ‘No arguments.’ She grinned at Maggie as she left. ‘You just have to think of this as a beginning, not an end, OK?’

‘OK,’ Maggie agreed weakly, but what little resolve she mustered had vanished by the time Sarah had shut the bedroom door.

Every time Pete thought of that evening, of that whole day really, it was always the same. He felt a sharp pang somewhere in the location of his heart, followed by a knotted feeling in his stomach. They were always brutally physical, his reactions to Stella, as if the emotions she engendered in him had seeped into each molecule of his body; as if it was only loving her that had made him three-dimensional at all.

Looking up, he glanced out of the window of the intercity train. Birmingham had been and gone about twenty minutes ago, next it would be Milton Keynes and then he’d be properly in the south. There’d be no getting away from it then. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his long legs crammed against his backpack. He’d wanted this more or less most of his life, to break out of two-bit TV work and get into film, but now that it was happening he wasn’t so sure. Now he was actually doing it he longed for his old small life, his telescope and Stella. The thought of her – just her name – constricted the flow of blood to his heart for a moment, and his fingers tightened on the seat.

Pete smiled to himself as he remembered the panic of that morning when he’d realised that Stella was leaving again, the day he’d decided, for once in his life, to stop her going. After Stella had agreed to meet him at Hugo’s she had dressed quietly, sweeping her long hair off her face and tying it in a loose knot, then spent a couple of moments looking through her earrings before selecting some large silver hoops. Stella said she liked the gypsy look, said it suited her nature.

‘I have to go out,’ she’d said. ‘I’ve got to rearrange some things so that I can meet you tonight?’ Her tone was tentative and uncertain, as if she was afraid that Pete wouldn’t let her go. Except of course Pete always let her go. He always let her go and he always took her back.