The Honey Queen (45 page)

Meredith had no idea what it was like not to have family support, no idea whatsoever. All she did was mope around the house, looking sad and droopy, until everybody was afraid to say anything in case Meredith started to cry. Freya was sick of it. She stormed in the door of the supermarket and looked around for her cousin.

Meredith had got the hang of the scanning pretty quickly. It wasn’t difficult. You learned where the barcodes were on most products, although sometimes they put them in completely ridiculous places, so that some pizzas in boxes had the barcodes on the lid and the only way to scan them was to turn the whole thing upside down, thereby dropping all the toppings on to the inside of the lid. But those sort of errors aside, it wasn’t a difficult job. Just utterly exhausting.

A few of the staff had figured out who she was, but they were OK about it. Glenny, a tall girl of about Meredith’s own age who looked ten years older, and had a husband and five children, thought it was great gas to tease Meredith about it. She didn’t mean any harm. There was no malice in Glenny.

‘Meredith, don’t run off with the till money, now! We’re watching you!’ she’d roar happily from her own till.

Amazingly, Meredith had got used to all the jokes.

‘No,’ she’d roar cheerfully back. ‘It’s the coupons. I have a ton of them in my pockets. I’m going to go off and get a load of free toilet rolls at the supermarket down the road. Nobody’ll ever catch me,’ and Glenny would hoot with laughter.

The people in the store were nice to her generally, but the young manager had an air about him that said he slightly objected to having someone with Meredith’s educational abilities working on the checkouts. She often caught him staring at her grimly, as though he imagined she was dreaming up great plots to take over his job any minute and the only way to stop such a coup would be to watch her. As if, Meredith thought. She barely had the energy to get dressed in the morning, never mind stage a coup over the assistant manager’s job in Super Savers.

The unsocial hours were the problem, that and the fact that you could spend three hours sitting at your till until your back ached and you had a crick in your neck from turning your head all the time and from the wind rushing in from the electric doors every time someone came in or out. And then there were the people. Some customers were nice and chatty, like the older people who needed someone to talk to and might not have said hello to a single soul that day until they came down to buy a bit of milk and cat food. Then there were the women with young babies and screaming toddlers; they nearly always said a few words, something along the lines of
Oh heck, I’m sorry I’m just throwing it all down and I know she’s screaming but there’s nothing I can do because she wants her bottle and we were too long going around because Taylor wanted sweets and I said no he couldn’t have any and now I think she’s got a dirty nappy as well. I should have had it delivered, I know, I should have had it delivered.

Meredith felt very sorry for all these people. Once there was a girl she recognized from school, a tall girl with bright eyes who’d been one of the sheeny, glamorous basketball captains, her sleek brown hair always tied in a glossy ponytail. She’d always done well academically, and was expected to go off and become a rocket scientist or something. She hadn’t recognized Meredith. Mind you, if Meredith hadn’t been imprisoned in the cashier’s chair she didn’t think she’d have recognized the former basketball captain either. Gone was the pupil-most-likely-to-succeed look and the glossy hair. Instead she had straggly greying hair tied back in an untidy ponytail and was wearing a shabby tracksuit that had clearly had breakfast thrown at it earlier.

Meredith hadn’t said hello; not because she was embarrassed on account of her own circumstances, but simply because the woman was clearly having such a bad day and Meredith hadn’t liked to intrude.

Another day, she’d met Grainne. Embarrassingly, she struggled to remember her name at first. Grainne was with a small girl whom she introduced as Teagan.

‘Freya must have told you all about her,’ Grainne said cheerfully. ‘She always tells me that you send your love when I meet her on the street.’

Meredith had felt both embarrassed and like a bad excuse for a human being. Freya had been nice to Grainne, once one of her friends, when in reality, Meredith had barely given Grainne a thought since she’d left Redstone.

‘We must meet up for a coffee one day,’ she said now to Grainne. ‘I’m back for a while.’

‘I’d love that,’ said Grainne, smiling.

This morning it was nearly break time and she was counting the minutes until she could close the till. Two more customers put their baskets down, brilliant, and then suddenly behind them was Freya, looking murderous. Meredith felt her heart sink. Freya hated her, there were no other words for it. They usually managed to avoid each other quite successfully in the house, with Freya spending time with Mum and Dad in the sitting room watching TV and Meredith either up in her bedroom or sneaking down the stairs to make a quick cup of tea in the kitchen.

‘I wanted to talk to you about your mother’s sixtieth,’ Freya hissed.

Meredith stuck up the
Till Closed
sign. ‘Pull that little gate closed, will you?’

Freya slammed it.

‘Meredith,’ roared a voice from the distance, ‘it’s not time for your break yet. Open that gate.’ Meredith flushed, an ugly dark purple.

‘Open it again,’ she said to Freya, and she removed the sign. A woman with a heavily laden trolley and what looked like an inadequate supply of bags lumbered towards her.

‘Oh God,’ said Meredith, ‘I’m exhausted.’

She looked at her cousin, who appeared to be almost smirking.

‘Why do you hate me?’ Meredith asked wearily.

‘I don’t hate you,’ said Freya, wondering if that was entirely the truth. ‘I just hate the way you treat your parents after all they’ve done for you. I know how good they are, and I know how devastated they’ve been by this whole thing, yet they never mention it to you, they never ask you when you’re going to start paying them proper money for your keep. They never do anything. You don’t volunteer information and you let them simmer with worry.
That’s
what I hate,’ Freya said.

She looked Meredith up and down, noting that her nails weren’t varnished and the beautiful blonde hair needed new highlights.

‘Anyway, I came down to talk to you about organizing your mother’s sixtieth. You might have thought of it yourself, but no, you were too busy thinking about person number one: Meredith. Well, maybe when you come back to planet Earth as opposed to planet Meredith, you might talk to me, Bobbi and Lillie about it. And by the way, it’s a secret – if you can keep it.’

With that, Freya turned on her heel and marched out. Meredith stared stonily after her. She wouldn’t cry, not here, not with mister smarty pants assistant manager watching her, but she wanted to.

Freya ran home. She didn’t know what had come over her, attacking Meredith that way. Harry, whom she saw all the time now, had once asked her why she seemed to hate Meredith so much when she loved all the rest of her cousins and she hadn’t been able to explain it fully.

‘She’s just fake,’ was all she could say.

‘She doesn’t seem fake,’ Harry said mildly. ‘I guess if she was, what happened to her would knock the fakeness out of her, don’t you think?’

But Freya didn’t know what to think.

‘Y
ou can’t call her Apricot for ever,’ said Fifi, as they sat in the shop’s tiny kitchenette and sipped tea. Peggy, despite being a coffee addict, had found it no trouble at all to give up, because even the scent of a macchiato made her want to retch.

‘I know. I’m scared of going through baby-name books, though, in case something happens.’

Peggy found she had a wildly superstitious fear of doing anything that implied certainty of Apricot’s birth. So she hadn’t given in to her desire to buy so much as a single pair of baby socks and refused to think of her baby as anything other than her beloved Apricot.

‘I’m waiting till the twenty-week scan before I get confident enough to think of names or anything,’ she admitted.

The bell above the door in the shop tinkled to show that a customer had entered.

‘My turn,’ said Peggy, getting up. ‘You’re on your lunchbreak.’ She went through to the shop.

‘Hello,’ said Bobbi.

‘You’re going to start knitting!’ said Peggy in delight.

‘No,’ said Bobbi. ‘I need to ask you a favour. I need to get my friend Opal out of her house this Saturday so we can do up the house for a surprise sixtieth birthday party. What do you think? Could she come on one of your courses or something?’

Fifi had come out at this point.

‘A surprise party,’ she said, ‘wonderful! Who’s it for?’

‘Opal,’ said Bobbi.

Fifi shot a glance at Peggy, who was quite pale. ‘We could do a felting course. She told me once she’d love to give it a try. I could email our customers and say we’ve places for ten people for this Saturday.’

‘Great,’ said Bobbi. ‘You tell me what time and I’ll tell Opal it’s a present from me.’

When Bobbi was gone, Fifi looked at her employer.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘Give a felting course,’ replied Peggy shakily.

‘That’s not what I meant.’

Peggy sat down on the stool behind the counter. ‘I know,’ she said.

‘Peggy, you have to tell David. It’s the right thing to do.’

‘I know,’ said Peggy, feeling wretched, ‘but he’ll hate me for keeping it from him.’

‘Why
are
you keeping it from him?’ said Fifi. ‘I don’t understand you, Peggy. He’s a great guy and he was clearly crazy about you. You don’t have to marry him, but morally, you really do need to tell him you’re having his baby.’

Peggy burst into tears. ‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘Why?’

Peggy looked at her through wet lashes and began to explain.

On Saturday, Bobbi dropped Opal at the knitting shop and casually asked Peggy to drive Opal home after the felting class.

‘We need to know exactly when she’s getting home so we can all jump out and say “Surprise!”’ Bobbi said. ‘You should say something along the lines that you’re going up past St Brigid’s Terrace if anyone wants a lift, imply that you know somehow that Opal lives up there. She’ll be sure to say yes. Then her family can tell her about the party and she can get into her glad rags and my girls will come up and beautify her. Shari’s going to do her make-up and Lizette, my senior stylist, will do her hair …’

It was a plan that had all seemed very simple and straightforward, except when you factored in that Opal was David’s mother. The grandmother of little Apricot.

Peggy wished there was a way she could get out of doing this. She didn’t want to go anywhere near Opal’s house in case she bumped into David. No, it was more than that, it was because it would hurt too much to even be near their home. She remembered the way David had described his childhood: idyllic and loving, for all the lack of funds and having to make do. But there was no way out – she had to drive Opal home.

All through the class, she felt on edge. It would be terrible if David saw her. She wasn’t hugely pregnant by any means, but her baby bump was obvious now.

But there was no getting away from it. After the course, Opal settled herself comfortably into Peggy’s Beetle.

‘This is a nice little car,’ she said. ‘I never learned to drive, myself. We didn’t have a car when I was young,’ Opal went on, oblivious to the strain on Peggy’s face.

‘Really?’ said Peggy, to keep the conversation going.

‘When is the baby due, love?’ asked Opal cosily. ‘You’re really hardly showing at all,’ she said, ‘but then you’re tall and I think tall women always carry pregnancy off so much better. Now me, I looked like a football when I was pregnant. Is it your first?’

‘Yes, actually,’ Peggy said in a strained voice.

‘And—’

Peggy knew that Opal was going to ask her about the father. Not out of nosiness, but simply because Opal was a kind woman who would ask all the right questions.

‘—the daddy, is he thrilled? People often think men aren’t interested in babies, but they are, trust me. I’ve had four and I’ve never seen Ned so thrilled as each time we found out I was pregnant.’

‘I’m on my own,’ Peggy said, feeling her hands shake on the steering wheel.

‘Oh, pet, I am sorry,’ said Opal, with such heartfelt sorrow that Peggy thought she might blurt out the truth.

‘So what are you up to tonight, Opal?’ Peggy asked wildly, anything to divert Opal’s attention. She didn’t think she’d be able to hold it together if Opal asked anything else about the baby’s father.

‘Oh, the girls are cooking dinner, I think,’ said Opal. ‘On Saturday nights, to be honest I like to sit at home and watch a bit of telly. It’s a very relaxing night, isn’t it? I know young people like to get out and go dancing and whatnot on a Saturday night, but when you get to my age, sitting in front of the fire with family is just beautiful. Now, Freya – she’s my niece that lives with us – she occasionally goes out on a Saturday night, now that she’s got a boyfriend: Harry. Nice boy, he is. They go to the cinema and have a pizza, but she has to be home early. She’s still very young, fifteen going on forty-four, as Ned says. Ned’s my husband and he loves her to bits. His favourite thing is when we all sit in and watch
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
He loves that show,’ Opal said happily. ‘I think at this stage we’ve seen all the episodes about four times over, but still, you’d be amazed at how you don’t remember the answers to some of the questions. They’re very tricky, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ said Peggy faintly, ‘very tricky.’

‘Just take the next left,’ said Opal. ‘It’s so kind of you to be driving me home, Peggy, love. I really appreciate it.’

‘Not at all,’ said Peggy. They were nearly there. Soon Opal would be out of the car and Peggy would have to make sure she was never left alone with her again. Opal was such a lovely woman, so into her family, and she’d love grandchildren, Peggy was sure of it. And Peggy wasn’t giving her the chance to know her grandchild. She knew it was wrong. The bigger little Apricot grew inside her, the more she knew how wrong it was to deny David the chance to know his baby. But Peggy didn’t dare tell him, because she knew the sort of man David was. He’d want them to move in together. To be a family. To get married, even. The whole family package.