Past Secrets. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ kids and a live-in nanny. You should see their house: Jacuzzi, pool, bidet in every en suite, the lot.’ I don’t buy your story, said her eyes. Long-term partner, my backside. Now Lorraine, she’s a success story. She has it all: fabulous husband, children, everything money can buy. She’s not home with her tail between her legs at the age of thirty with no ring and no kids either.

      ‘How wonderful for her,’ Maggie said, adding a large bar of chocolate to the basket to comfort herself. ‘Lorraine always knew what she wanted, didn’t she?’ She snatched back her shopping and shoved it into a bag. Lorraine was a hard-nosed little madam and she was always keen on self-improvement without doing any actual work. Like stealing other people’s homework or hanging round with the class bullies.

      ‘Bye, Gretchen, have to rush.’

      On her way home with the grocery bags weighing her down, Maggie passed the time by trying to remember who lived in the various houses on Summer Street. Many of them were still owned by the people who’d lived there when she was a child, like the Ryans, who bred Burmese cats and never minded the neighbourhood children coming in to coo over the latest batch of apricot-coloured kittens. Or sweet Mrs Sirhan, who’d looked eighty when Maggie had been small, and now must be unbelievably old, but still went for her constitutional every day, up the street into the café for a cup of Earl Grey with lemon.

      There was a sign on the park gate: ‘Save Our Park’, written in shaky capitals on a bit of cardboard, and Maggie idly wondered what the park had to be saved from. But the sign-writer hadn’t thought to add that bit of information. Rampaging aliens, perhaps? Or people who didn’t scoop the dog poop?

      The old railway pavilion was her favourite part of the park: she’d played in it many times during her childhood and it was easy to imagine it as a train station, with ladies in long dresses sobbing into their reticules as handsome men left them behind, sad stories behind every parting. There hadn’t been a train that way for many years.

      The train tracks were long gone, too. Maybe that was the lesson she needed to learn: nobody cared about the past. Her misery over Grey would mean nothing in a hundred years.

      It was ten before Maggie managed to escape to bed and to her private misery. She’d left her mobile phone unanswered all day and when she finally checked there were seven where are you? texts from Shona, along with two missed calls and one I am so sorry, please answer your phone text from Grey.

      Yeah, right, Maggie thought furiously, erasing it. One lousy text and a couple of phone calls. What an effort that must have been. Feeling angry with Grey was easier than giving in to feeling hopeless and alone. If she let go of the anger, she’d collapse under the weight of the loneliness.

      She unwrapped the giant bar of milk chocolate she’d bought and dialled the only person in the world, apart from Shona, who might possibly understand: her cousin Elisabeth. Despite coming up with the nickname Bean, Elisabeth was one of Maggie’s favourite people.

      Elisabeth was tall, athletic, had been captain of the netball team and was wildly popular at her school, a fact that had often made Maggie wish they’d gone to the same one. She might have protected Maggie. She was now a booker in one of Seattle’s top model agencies and incredibly, despite all these comparative riches, she was a nice person.

      It was eight hours earlier in Seattle and Elisabeth was on her lunch break, sitting at her desk with her mouth full of nuts because she was still doing the low-carb thing.

      ‘How are you doing?’ asked Elisabeth in muffled tones.

      ‘Oh, you know, fine. You heard about Mum’s accident?’

      ‘Yes, Dad told me.’ Her father and Maggie’s were brothers. ‘You don’t sound OK,’ she added suspiciously.

      Elisabeth picked up tones of voice like nobody else. Certainly nobody else in the Maguire family, who all had the intuition of celery. ‘What’s up?’

      ‘I told you.’

      ‘I mean what else?’

      ‘You can hear something else in my voice?’

      ‘I spend all my life on the phone to young models in foreign countries asking them how they are, did anybody hit on them and are they eating enough/drinking too much/taking coke/ screwing the wrong people/screwing anybody. So yes, I can hear it in your voice,’ insisted Elisabeth.

      ‘I caught Grey in bed with another woman.’

      Silence.

      ‘Fuck.’

      ‘I didn’t know you were allowed to say that outside Ireland any more,’ Maggie remarked, in an attempt at levity. ‘Everyone on your side of the Atlantic nearly passes out when they hear it, when here, it’s a cross between an adjective and an adverb, the sort of word we can’t do without.’

      ‘Desperate situations need desperate words,’ said Elisabeth, then said ‘fuck’ again followed by, ‘Fucking bastard.’

      ‘My sentiments exactly.’

      ‘Is he still alive?’

      ‘He has all his teeth, yes,’ Maggie said.

      ‘And they’re not on a chain around his neck?’

      Maggie laughed and it was a proper laugh for the first time all day. Elisabeth was one of those people with the knack of making the unbearable slightly more bearable. With her listening, Maggie didn’t feel like the only person on the planet to have been hurt like this before.

      ‘No, they’re still in his mouth. I did think about hitting him but he was attached to this blonde fourteen-year-old at the time…’

      ‘A fourteen-year-old!’ shrieked Elisabeth.

      ‘Metaphorically speaking,’ Maggie interrupted. ‘She’s probably twenty or twenty-one, actually. Gorgeous, from the angle I was looking from. Which was really a bummer. I mean, if she was ugly and wrinkly, I might manage to cope, but being cheated on with a possible centrefold doesn’t do much for your self-confidence.’

      ‘Oh, Maggie,’ said Elisabeth and there was love and pity in her voice. She’d long since given up trying to boost Maggie’s self-esteem, although having a beautiful cousin with a skewed vision of her gorgeousness was perfect training for working with stunning size six models who thought they were too fat and faced rejection every day. ‘I wish I was there to give you a hug. What did you do?’

      ‘Dad phoned about Mum, so I left to come here. Ran away, in other words, which is what I’m good at.’

      ‘You haven’t told them.’

      ‘No. Couldn’t face it.’

      Maggie heard muffled noises at Elisabeth’s end.

      ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. Call me tomorrow?’

      ‘Sure.’

      Maggie looked at her suitcases waiting patiently to be unpacked. It was hard to feel enthusiastic about moving back into her childhood bedroom. All she needed now was one of those big doll’s heads that you put eye make-up on, her old Silver Brumby books, and she’d be eleven again.

      She’d СКАЧАТЬ