River Deep (19 page)

‘Carmen? Hi, it’s me, Louise. Look, I hope you don’t mind me calling you like this. It’s not about work, but … Oh God, we’ve just had the hugest row and I couldn’t think of anyone else to talk to!’

Louise didn’t pause for breath and Maggie guessed it was because she knew if she stopped talking she’d start crying.

‘I spent a whole week trying to pluck up the courage to talk to him about it and, well, he hadn’t said a word about her for ages and I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to. Then this afternoon he came into the office and started going on at me about this order I’d forgotten to chase up, and he just shouted right at me “Maggie would never have forgotten that”. I couldn’t stand it! I tried to explain to him how I felt about this Maggie, and how I couldn’t stand him flinging her in my face all the time, you know, like you said to, and he just went off on one. He said I was clingy and too pushy. That I wanted too much too soon and that he was sick of women trying to pull pieces out of him. He just walked out on me, and, and …’

Louise stopped talking and started crying, and Maggie, her hidden agenda all but forgotten, wanted to reach out and hug her. She had the strangest sensation of déjà vu. That she was talking to herself, counselling herself on how to deal with Christian’s mood swings, and then she realised that that was what she often did do. Almost every day that they were together she’d have to take herself off and give herself a good talking-to about how to say certain things or be a certain way, the certain way that would keep him happy, tender and loving. She was the official expert on how to handle him. She practically had letters after her name.

‘OK, it’s OK, babe. Calm down. Listen, he’ll calm down, and when he does you can talk things through again. He hates people pushing him into corners so you’ll need to let him have his space for a while. Let him come to you. Let him talk himself into thinking that he’s in control. That way he doesn’t feel bullied,’ Maggie stopped herself from adding ‘like he was at school’ just in time. She snapped sharply back into her own head and tried to shake off the sensation that she’d just had an out-of-body experience.

There was a wet sniff and then a pause. ‘How do you know all that stuff?’ Louise asked inevitably.

Maggie stalled momentarily, and in that second fought her own private battle with good and evil. On a much smaller scale than, say,
Lord of the Rings
, but in its own way just as epic. Good triumphed, and she decided not to manipulate Louise any more. Nothing she could say and do now would make a difference anyway. She should have realised sooner. Christian would only do what he wanted to do. No one had ever made him do otherwise, not since the moment he’d left home; it was a promise he’d made to himself.

‘Oh, because he’s a man,’ she said to Louise. ‘All men are the same, aren’t they? And anyway, like I said before, I had an ex just like him. Once.’

If Louise could detect the note of resignation in Maggie’s voice she didn’t mention it, and why would she? She didn’t know that Maggie had more or less handed her one true love to her on a plate.

‘Look, it would be great to have someone to talk to face to face – do you want to go out tomorrow night for a drink? Christian’s got a business dinner, and if I could say I was doing something else it might make him feel I was a bit less dependent on him? Also it’d be really nice to have a good old girly chat. I really miss my friends. It’s so hard to meet people in this city. All the men just want to shag you, and all the women ignore you.’

Maggie felt a pang of empathy for Louise and wondered about it for a second, but she knew she couldn’t, that she had to pull herself out of the whole sorry mess as quickly as possible and try to put it behind her. Somehow the prospect of the several years of misery it would take to get over Christian was strangely liberating. She’d have The Fleur, she thought, and even if she was alone and childless for ever she’d have Becca and Sam. She could mother them when Sarah was busy at the salon and babysit their kids. In the moment that she gave up all hope, she found a comforting sort of vacuum instead. It was really a relief.

‘I can’t, Louise, I’m sorry. I’m leaving the country for a while to go to, er … Australia. Urgent business. I’ll call you, though, when I get back, I promise,’ Maggie lied, and said her goodbyes, adding on a silent apology.

She looked at her dormant phone and decided to call Sarah to tell her that she’d stopped being insane and decided to try and get on with her life instead. When the phone suddenly jumped into life in her hand, Maggie dropped it, answering it before she could look at the caller display.

‘Mags?’ it was Christian, his voice suddenly right there nestling in her ear. Although it had only been a week since she had last seen him, the whole world seemed like an entirely different place. To hear his voice again was an incredibly welcome rush of familiarity.

‘Christian? Hello.’ She tried to neutralise all nuance of meaning out of her voice. Her whole body was once again as taut as a string on a bow.

‘You’ve been on the phone for bloody ages. Gossiping to Sarah, were you?’

Maggie sat down on her bed and took a deep breath. He sounded normal, he sounded as if he’d just called her on his way home from the office. He sounded like he was still her Christian.

‘You know me,’ she said, her voice holding an uncertain smile. ‘Can’t stop talking once I start.’ This wasn’t actually true, but Christian had always teased her about it and for some reason she’d never got round to correcting him. There were some sounds on the other end of the phone. Maggie thought she heard traffic, maybe, and the sound of other people walking by. Louise had said he’d stormed out. Maybe he was coming here! Maggie leapt up from her bed and went to the window, her heart thundering in her chest. The street below was empty, at least of Christian.

‘Mags, listen,’ Christian said, making her jump. ‘Are you free tomorrow night? I know it’s a bit of a cheek, but … I really need to see you, darling.’

Maggie clasped her phone with both hands, pressing it into the side of her face. Was this it? This couldn’t be it, she wasn’t ready, she hadn’t prepared. Her chest tightened and she bit her lip hard until she could taste blood. After all of her dreaming and hoping and planning, now that the moment had come she found she was losing her nerve. ‘Come on,’ she told herself sternly. ‘Don’t blow this now. The rest of your life depends on you getting this right.’

She lay back on the bed and clasped the phone to her cheek as if it was a lover’s hand, hoping to sound seductive and offhand all at once.

‘Well, I did have something on, but they’ve just cancelled. So, yes,’ she said simply. ‘I’m free.’ She heard Christian breathe out what might have been a sigh of relief.

‘Good. Good. I’ll meet you, OK, by the abbey at eight o’clock?’

‘OK.’ Maggie said. It was all she could say.

After he’d gone, Maggie lay on her bed and dreamt of being in his arms again, sure that by the end of Friday night she would be. And to think that she had been on the verge of giving up on it all. Everything was going to be fine now, everything was going to be all right. Christian was coming back to her.

Pete shut the front door behind him with a satisfying thud.

‘
Carpe
bloody
diem
my arse,’ he told the dust-laden plaster cherubs that garlanded each side of the hallway arch.

He’d tried his best today, he really had. He’d stood up there and talked about the day he knew he wanted to go into special effects more than anything in the world, more even than being a striker for Leeds FC. It was the day he was watching
Forty Million Years BC
on the telly; he was about eight. ‘You’d laugh your socks off now,’ he’d told them, ‘if you saw it, but back then – well, it was revolutionary. And as a young bloke I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than making creatures I’d only ever seen in books come suddenly, amazingly to life. It seemed like … magic.’

He’d neglected to mention that actually Raquel Welch in a fur bikini had run a very close second to the T-Rex and populated his dreams fairly constantly for very many years afterwards.

‘We’re all about CGI and 3D animation now, but what will we be doing in twenty years’ time, or thirty? That’s what excites
me
and inspires
me
! I want to be part of that revolution. I want to create it, and you should too, otherwise you’re just wasting your time here!’

As Pete stood in front of the students, his hands on his hips, he’d scanned each one of their faces for something – anything – that he might be able to take a spark of hope from. But it had looked to him as if they were all a bit hungover, and one of them very possibly had the plague, or at least a very messy case of flu.

‘So, er, Pete.’ Charlie, maybe the only halfway decent one there, had piped up. ‘How do you think you contributed to the revolution on Dougie the Digger then?’ The rest of the class had sniggered. Pete’s hands fell to his sides and his shoulders slumped; then he thought for a moment. In ten years on Dougie, actually, he
had
seen a lot of changes. He’d even implemented a few. Maybe it wasn’t all Final Flipping Fantasy and Keanu Reeves in a catsuit or whatever, but it was still revolutionary in its way.

‘I’m glad you asked me that, Charlie,’ Pete had begun, and he hadn’t stopped for another two hours and forty-two minutes. He was fairly sure that none of them were very inspired by his lecture, and by the end some of them were even catatonic, but at least he’d got through the afternoon in one piece, and at the very least it had clarified his own feelings. He had to get this job at Magic Shop, he
had
to. It was his life’s dream and it
did
excite him – just the thought of it invigorated him in the same way a clear night sky and the Milky Way did, or Stella’s slender finger unbuttoning her jeans. Although a very small, nearly silent part of him was quietly glad that Stella wasn’t there to distract him this time. He felt he had an almost clear head at last.

‘Does anybody fancy a pint?’ Pete called out to the house at large.

He waited for any kind of reply and decided that Ange and Falc must both be out. Then a small noise, like a strangulated whine, rose unmistakably from Angie’s room. ‘Oh fuck, they’re shagging.’ Pete looked resentfully at the door. He was an easygoing bloke; he didn’t care who shagged who or when as a rule, but for some reason on this summer evening he’d really rather that the rest of world were as celibate as he was. He had a flash of memory – Stella’s breasts crushed against him, her nails on his back, her teeth pulling at the skin on his neck – and felt desire surge though him like an electrical current. Pete began walking rather stiffly up the stairs.

‘Pete, is that you?’ It was Angie. Her voice seemed muffled and damp. He stopped on the third stair and looked back at her bedroom door. She knew it was him, so he couldn’t really sneak away upstairs and do what he’d been planning to do. He tucked his hand inside his waistband and adjusted himself into a marginally less obscene position before replying.

‘Yeah, it’s me. You all right?’ Pete said, knowing already what the reply would be. Girls in the middle of passionate sex didn’t stop to enquire on the obvious identity of house mates. Girls crying their eyes out did, though. The door opened and Angie emerged, her round face further swollen and red with tears.

‘Oh, Pete.’ Angie held out her arms to him in an alarmingly disarming plea to be hugged. ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do. What am I going to do?’

Pete took Angie in his arms and held her as she sobbed noisily against his chest for several minutes, until at last she was able to lead him back into her room. He tried not to notice the damp patch that had formed just below his right shoulder, and fortunately at the sight of Angie in tears his hard-on had dwindled almost instantly. She sat on the bed and looked at him miserably. After a moment’s consideration Pete sat next to her, caught somewhere between being genuinely worried for her and feeling like a condemned man.

‘Can’t you tell me what it is?’ he said eventually, handing Angie some bog roll he found lying by the side of the bed. She took it gratefully and blew her nose loudly, balling up the damp tissue in her fists.

‘It’s Falcon. Or rather, it’s me.’ She shook her head, genuinely bemused. ‘When we’re together we have such a good time, a really great time. The sex is … incredible, and I don’t think it’s just great for me. And most of the time I’m OK with the way things are. It’s not as if I see myself marrying him or anything, it’s just that sometimes I want more. I don’t even know if I want more with him. It’s just sometimes I wish I had that kind of intimacy you must have with Stella, that kind of trust.’

Pete didn’t tell her that he wished he had that kind of relationship with Stella too.

‘And then I start feeling miserable,’ Angie continued, ‘and I start crying and I just wish I didn’t care, like I’m supposed to. Like Falcon thinks I don’t.’ She looked up at Pete. ‘I don’t even know why I’m crying. I’m fairly sure I don’t love him.’ Her expression changed. ‘You’re in love, you must know all about it. What’s wrong with me?’

And in that moment Pete considered death row an appealing alternative to the hot seat he was in right then. He thought for a moment and then decided just to start talking and hope something reasonable would eventually come out.

‘Maybe, if you’re not enjoying it, you should just stop?’ he suggested half-heartedly. But he knew better than anyone that stopping something you didn’t enjoy but seemed to need was easier said than done.

‘Well, yes,’ Angie nodded, ‘yes, I did think of that, but then I wouldn’t have anyone or anything, would I? And I think Falcon cares about me, otherwise why would he sleep with me?’

Pete avoided her eyes and looked at his hands. He couldn’t tell Angie the truth that blokes like sex more than most things – OK, anything – and that getting it was usually preferable to not, particularly if there was supposedly a guaranteed absence of emotional aftermath. Even Pete, who would never cheat on Stella, had struggled recently with all the women in their strappy tops and short skirts. With their tanned legs and cleavages. Pete had found his thoughts straying from Stella. In his heart of hearts he knew that part of her final quest to make sure that he was the man she should marry would involve her sleeping with someone else, maybe more than one person. But he couldn’t reciprocate. To him the thought of having a meaningless shag while he was marking time waiting for her return would demean everything he felt for her. Well, maybe not the
thought
of a meaningless shag, but he definitely wouldn’t actually
do
it. After Candi there had been no one else, not even during their many relationship breaks, and he accepted the double standards that applied to them. He couldn’t risk making Stella that angry again. He might lose her for ever.