When Good Friends Go Bad (2 page)

The paper was lined, ripped along the edge. It looked like a torn-out page from a school jotter.

'That is mine,' Meg said, taking it. A memory hit her. Fourteen years old, standing in front of Mr Dugan's English class, reciting a poem she'd written, while behind their hands, Rowan, Jen and Georgina sniggered away.

'Rowan is the pretty one
Who makes the boys look round.
Georgina is the sensible one
Feet firmly on the ground.
Jen is the funny one
Cracking jokes all day,
While I am like the butterfly
Who will one day fly away.

'You didn't know your mom was a poet, did you?'

'That's lucky,' Zeb quipped. 'Cos you might need a new career. Remember when we came back from our last "adventure", old man Bradley at the diner said if we ever take off like that again he wouldn't hold your job open, even if you were Waitress of the Month from January to July.'

But Meg was lost in the memory of that long-ago day. As she'd walked back to take her seat, Georgina had hissed, loud enough for half the class to hear, 'Bloody big-head. Why aren't I the sodding butterfly?'

And Meg had seen Jen and Rowan swap looks. What they couldn't say, wouldn't ever dare say, was, 'Because you're built like a bus, Georgina. You'd never leave the ground.'

Georgina's weight was an unspoken subject.

To her face, anyway.

'Who cares about that dumb-ass Mr Bradley?' Meg reassured her son, a little belatedly. 'It's only a diner.'

Zeb glanced down at the paper again. 'Weren't you as funny as Jen, then?' He sounded disappointed, as if she'd let him down.

Meg pulled a big old suitcase held together with silver duct tape on to the bed. 'Jen could have been a stand-up on
Saturday Night Live,'
she shrugged. 'She had us in stitches most days.' From next to Zeb's left foot, she picked up a cracked old photo of the four of them together on the Ashport promenade. Meg was doing the peace sign above Rowan's head, Georgina was standing sideways on, looking like she'd rather not be there, Jen was stretching her cheeks back so she resembled some creature from a horror movie and Rowan's eyes were half closed, a Buddha-like smile on her lips.

'I was more the . . .' She fumbled for the word. 'Well, I guess the instigator of stuff.' For a brief second she could sense a tiny prickling behind her eyes, before she shoved the scattered documents messily back in their folder.

On the table in the poky dining area, her laptop beckoned. Meg walked over and clicked on the mouse.

It took ages for the refurbished machine to warm up, and irritation flickered as she waited. The computer came from a thrift store, along with almost every possession she and Zeb owned, but at least it worked, not like that crappy CD player she bought last month. Finally, the program began to run – the hourglass icon indicating it was downloading from the server. Apart from a few spam invitations for her to invest large sums of money, ha, there was nothing in her inbox.

Maybe Jen's friend hadn't passed on the message. Or maybe Jen was still sour about Starkey, and Georgina too much of a big shot to return her phone calls or hit the reply on an email? Or were there other reasons for their silence, the thought of which made Meg sick to her stomach? Since their last meeting, she'd honestly thought she'd never see the other girls again. (OK, so they were definitely women, late thirties, but she would forever think of them as girls.) And now here she was, voluntarily opening up the can of worms, getting ready to do a little fishing.

Boy, this trip had better be worth it. Even if she hadn't paid for the tickets, she knew how much things cost in the UK. A year's worth of tips would only go so far before she'd have to start begging Mace or Pop to help her out. If the tests didn't go the way she hoped . . . well, they just had to, that's all. There was more than her life riding on them.

But then again, what had she and Zeb to lose? She swept her gaze around her home, loathing the single wide trailer they'd washed up in, from its Formica kitchen to its fake wood panelling, narrow hallway and ceilings so low Zeb could jump up and touch them. She hated it all: the trailer park, her supposedly temporary job, her whole life.

If only Rowan were around to cast her healing oil on troubled waters, the way she had countless times when things between them were tense. Of the four, she was the only one guaranteed to keep a secret and not pass it on as juicy gossip. Meg had been the worst in that regard but even Jen could accidentally blurt out forbidden information and Georgina often missed the glares and frantic cues shot at her whenever she had put her big foot in it. But Rowan was different, more sensitive.

She and Rowan both had weird parents. Rowan's mother – total wacko, with her beady eyes and wild hair, seeing sin and evil in everything. And Clover and Herb might have been envied by Meg's closest friends, but the other kids at school thought they were odd beyond redemption. Their strange attire, Herb's Frank Zappa moustache. It never paid to stand out in Ashport and Meg's parents were anything but conforming. Clover had even offered the headmaster a toke one memorable sports day to mellow him out. Her 'wanna hit, man?' and his scandalised response had been the stuff school legends are made of. They were lucky Clover wasn't arrested and Meg expelled.

'Wanna hit, man?' became another mocking catchphrase that followed Meg around the playground, just as their classmates, especially the boys, loved to chant at Rowan, 'Yucky da, Taffy, how's your loony mammy?' or their other favourite, 'Rowan was a Welshman, Rowan was a thief . . .' Rowan was too shy to fight back, whereas Meg always had some withering retort to silence their tormentors, usually some sexual insult involving the boys' tiny wienies. But her brash American bravado hid the fact that it took an immense amount of willpower for Meg to go in and fight her way through each day after Clover's faux pas. Few people guessed that secretly she longed to be like everyone else, not some talked-about freak. Rowan was the only person Meg had ever allowed herself to rage and cry in front of. They'd walk for miles along the beach or huddle by the breakwater, smoking a cigarette, sharing their troubles.

Rowan was the dreamer of the group. Never waspish like Meg, nor snobbish or bullying like Georgina nor thoughtlessly eviscerating like Jen's sometimes gut-slicing humour. She'd been the staunchest of friends and ever the mediator, someone to call truce and intervene when the others were ganging up together.

But then again, if it weren't for Rowan, she wouldn't be in this mess. They could all have gone on their merry way, laid the friendship in a deep, deep grave and never had to see each other again.

Finally, Meg fastened the case, slung her carry-on bag over her shoulder and hauled everything to the front door, next to Zeb's backpack.

'Ready?' she asked him. 'Come on Zeb, don't dawdle. The taxi's waiting and you know what the security lines are like.'

'Yeah, well,' Zeb waggled a blue folder he'd picked off the kitchen table, 'you might want to bring these.'

'Shit.' She snatched the tickets from him and shoved them in her black travel wallet. 'Thanks, dude.'

'Yes.' Georgina opened her mouth in an exaggerated fashion and shouted into the elderly man's face.
'That's right. Down near that hole, by the wooden fence. You can tip it out behind the rhododendrons.'

When she was young, her parents had employed a handyman to do some light maintenance work around their house who supposedly was deaf. Georgina used to turn her back on him and say rude words, like bottom and wee-wee and fart. And then one day her mother asked her if she'd been rude to Dick as he could hear perfectly well with his hearing aid in.

But this chappie didn't seem to comprehend a single word. Communication this morning had been nigh-on impossible, and Georgina was far too stretched to exhaust herself trying to tell him he'd cut the wrong hedge. Where was Aiden when she needed him? She shouldn't have to handle irritations like this overripe, sweat-stained clod in filthy dungarees, grinning inanely as he held out a grimy hand with a barn-load of manure under his fingernails.

Inwardly huffing with annoyance, lady-of-the-manor expression on her face, she dug in her purse for some notes, wondering why her husband had chosen to hire the village idiot. Did he do these things purposely to wind her up? Well, he could darn well unhire him. With what she was paying out, it had to be possible to find a gardener who at least knew his trade, challenged or not.

Sighing, she returned to her huge desk, littered with sketches. Daylight from the floor-to-ceiling bay window streamed on to what she called her 'creative jumble'. She hadn't yet switched on her exorbitantly expensive computer loaded with hi-tech drawing programs. When it came to brainstorming she still preferred paper and pencil.

The phone was ringing again. She listened, willing herself not to answer, six rings, seven, then silence. Five minutes later a tall figure was at the double glass-paned doors to her office, holding out a glass of Perrier with a slice of lime, looking relaxed and ravishingly Byronic in cream chinos and a half-buttoned shirt, a red Kabbalah string tied around his wrist.

'That was Heal's,' he said. 'I told them you were just about there. Couple more weeks at the most.'

'A couple of weeks!' Georgina shrieked at a pitch that almost shattered the bulb in her Tiffany lamp. 'I've barely started the blasted thing.'

'Oh, come on.' He moved over to her, placing the water on the desk and pushing back her hair with a hand chilly from holding the glass. Stooping, he bent to kiss the back of her neck. Despite herself, Georgina felt a familiar thrill of pleasure. 'A few poxy sheets and towels? You could do that in your sleep.'

'But that's exactly it.' Georgina heard her voice grow operatic again as she swatted his chin from her shoulder. 'I don't get any sleep. I'm completely exhausted, lying awake till bloody dawn, worrying about all this.'

'Hmm, I thought I heard you roaming the halls like some poor lost ghost last night.' He opened one of the balls of scrawled-over paper on the desk, revealed a drawing of a butterfly, and crumpled it up again, tossing it into the waste-paper basket in one neat shot. 'Look, Georgie, you don't want to push yourself to a breakdown. We have all those designers on staff, why don't you get one of them to . . .'

'No!' Forcing a smile, she tried to battle her rising hysteria. 'I won't do it. I can't. They're paying for Georgina Giordani and Georgina Giordani it shall be.'

Chewing the end of her HB pencil, she experienced a rush of despair, the same terror that hit her at the start of every project, only this time it was worse than ever. No matter that she was a thousand times more successful than that nameless art teacher who'd once sneered at her labours for being 'technically accurate but lacking in soul'. For all that Giordani Designs were rapidly heading towards Laura Ashley status, for all that she had a mini-empire of over a hundred employees in her converted Canary Wharf offices overseeing every aspect of her celebrated lines of clothing, linens, bedspreads, blinds, pillowcases, here she was skulking in her seventeenth-century manor house, relying on her home help to fend off all callers.

Inside her svelte stylish exterior she felt like a big fat fraud. The truth was Georgina Giordani Carrington had run out of ideas. The well was dry. If she was honest, it had never been more than a shallow ditch to begin with.

Back in Ashport everyone knew Rowan was the true artist, who could produce marvels with a piece of chalk and spin fairy tales from a chewed-up stub of crayon. 'Oh, she may have some raw talent, dear,' Georgina's mother would pronounce, rustling
Harpers & Queen
between her bejewelled fingers. 'But you have taste. It's in your breeding. We are related to the Fitzherberts, you know. What you have is simply ingrained, it can't be bought or taught.'

And why was she thinking about Rowan, comparing herself all over again, like she used to so many years ago? Because of that damn Meg, leaving umpteen messages on her answer-phone. Well they could jolly well stay unanswered. She pushed the pin back into her long thick hair and smoothed down her Karen Millen smock. Georgina had initially made her name designing extravagant, eye-catching clothes for the plus-sized woman but she no longer had to wear them herself, thank goodness.

Aiden watched her scribble meaningless whorls and circles on the pad in front of her, his expression veiled behind half-closed eyelids. He walked to the window, gazed out at the debris the gardener had left behind, then turned. 'Well, maybe I'll leave you to it.'

'No. Don't go.' She grabbed his hand as he passed behind the desk, holding it to her shoulder. 'I hate sitting here alone. Can't you stay?'

He wasn't quite pulling away but she could sense his fingers itching to break free. It made her want to cling to him tighter.

'I don't want to hinder the artistic flow,' he said, matter-of-factly. 'You'll be able to concentrate better if I'm not around. I'll be in the drawing room, playing my guitar.'

'Play it in here. It won't bother me, honest. Something soothing. What about that David Gray one that I like? Or a Coldplay song?'

He made a face, shaking his head ruefully, before conceding. 'Oh baby, the things I do for Giordani.'

Half an hour later, she threw the pencil down in disgust.

'This is
such
a waste of time. I might as well give up for the day.'

In a corner of the room, Aiden was sprawled with his legs over the extra-large armchair that was big enough to hold two, fingers picking at the nylon guitar strings as he improvised a nameless blues.

She stared at him, frustrated by his complete absorption while she was ready to tear out her hair.

'Do me a favour, will you?' Her voice croaked harshly and she softened it to a plea. 'How about making me a sundae? To get my creative juices going? Just a couple of scoops of vanilla with a few of those raspberries in the fridge?'

Carefully he put the Gibson on the floor, stood up and stretched. 'I'd love to, Georgie, but no can do.' His eyes met hers and held them with his stare. 'I reckon maybe the freezer's developed some kind of black hole or the midnight bandits are breaking in again. I shoved a couple of tubs of ice cream in there at the weekend and this morning when I went to pull out the butter, it had disappeared.'