Just Between Us. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ Don’t be silly.’ Bunny shook her head vigorously. ‘You look wonderful, Holly. You’re going to wow them all tonight.’

      School reunions should be banned, Holly muttered, testing a nail to see if it was dry. Ever since Donna had phoned with the exciting news about the ten-year reunion of their class from Kinvarra’s Cardinal School, Holly had fretted. For a woman with self-esteem so low it could limbo dance under a two-inch fence, the prospect of meeting the girls she’d been in school with was one filled with terror.

      Old schoolmates would want to know what exciting things Holly was doing with her life and what sort of fabulous men she was going out with. ‘Er nothing’ and ‘nobody’ would not be adequate answers. On the plus side, at least she’d lost weight since school, but she was never going to be what anyone would call thin. And what was the point of being thinner when she had nothing to show for it?

      Donna, her best friend from school, was thrilled at the very notion of a reunion, and had talked excitedly about how lovely it would be to catch up with everyone.

      ‘Just think, our class together again after all these years. I can’t imagine some of them as twenty-eight-year-olds: they’re stuck in my mind at seventeen. Obviously, I don’t mean Lilli and Caroline,’ she said. ‘I meet them every day at the school gates when I’m dropping Emily off and they’re just the same, really. But there are so many girls and I don’t really know what they’ve been up to. So many of them are living in the city or abroad…It’ll be wonderful to see everyone again, won’t it?’

      ‘Yes,’ bleated Holly.

      ‘I heard that Michelle Martin’s coming too, which is a coup for the organising group. Who’d have ever thought that one of our girls would be a big TV star.’

      ‘Donna, she’s a news reporter, not Britney Spears,’ Holly pointed out, overcoming her anxiety in order to set the record straight. Michelle had been a total nightmare at school: loud, overopinionated and determined to get the shy girls (like Holly and Donna) involved. Anyone who didn’t go along with her (Holly and Donna, again) received contemptuous glances which implied that amoebas were more fun. ‘We used to hide from her, if you remember.’

      ‘No we didn’t.’ Donna sounded cheerful. ‘Oh it’s going to be such fun. You are coming, aren’t you, Holly? I know you’re madly busy and probably have zillions of glamorous Christmas parties to go to, but this will be fantastic. I know December’s two months away but I’ve already told Mark he’ll have to baby-sit because I’m going to stay overnight in Dublin. That’s the whole point of having it in a hotel, so there’s no awfulness about getting taxis and lifts home.’

      Donna still lived in Kinvarra, but many of the school’s old girls had moved to the city, which was why a hotel in Dublin had been chosen for the party. Donna was doubly pleased at this. For a start, there’d be no chance of wild misbehaving at a reunion in her home town where gossip spread like wildfire. Secondly, she loved visiting Dublin and this trip would mean a bit of blissful shopping the next day without having to manoeuvre a buggy round too.

      ‘The only problem is what to wear?’ mused Donna, before going on to list possible outfits and why they weren’t suitable because they were old/unfashionable/too tight on the hips. ‘Of course, you won’t have that problem, Holly. When you’re going out every night like you, you know exactly what to wear. Mark and I never get further than Maria’s Diner these days and you can turn up in a sweatshirt covered with baby sick and nobody bats an eyelid.’

      After a few more minutes of this, Donna’s toddler, Jack, began crying loudly and she had to go.

      Holly hung up slowly and smiled ruefully at the very notion of her having a wild life with zillions of glamorous parties to go to and the perfect wardrobe for every occasion. Dear Donna, she hadn’t a clue. She thought anyone who’d escaped the clutches of rural Kinvarra automatically entered some sort of Hollywood-style twilight zone where life was wildly exciting, invitations crammed the mantelpiece and gorgeous men were forever on the phone, demanding to know why you wouldn’t go to Rio with them.

      Holly had given up trying to explain that being a sales assistant in the children’s department in Lee’s was short on glamour and actually involved a lot of time in the stock room patiently folding T-shirts for four-year-olds. The only way a man would ever throw himself at her was if one fell down the stairs on the 15A bus when she was on her way up. This had actually happened, although the man in question had been a deeply embarrassed teenager and had practically run off in mortification afterwards. Holly had been bruised for weeks.

      And as for going out, Holly was far too quiet to merit inclusion in the Lee’s party-animal gang. Parties in general filled her with horror. She became obsessed with what to wear, inevitably ending up in black for its slimming properties, and even more inevitably ending up in the kitchen because of the crippling shyness that overwhelmed her on social occasions. Holly’s ideal outing was the pub with Kenny and Joan, who lived in the flat opposite.

      She had once explained this to Donna, but Donna would have none of it.

      ‘You’re only trying to cheer me up,’ she’d insisted. ‘There’s no point denying it. Exciting things happen in cities, not like in this dump. For God’s sake, they nearly declare a state of emergency in Kinvarra when Melanie’s Coffee Shop runs out of fudge cake.’

      ‘Kinvarra is a lovely place,’ protested Holly.

      ‘If it’s that lovely, why did you leave?’ demanded Donna, refusing to admit that there was any comparison between the fleshpots of the city and a small, pretty town sixty miles away.

      ‘Ah, you know, I just wanted to travel a bit,’ Holly said.

      Holly wrote down the date of the reunion in her diary and began a plan of worry. This was similar to a plan of action but involved no actual action and, instead, lots of soul-searching ‘how-can-I-get-out-of-it?’ moments in the dead of the night. She also wondered how Donna had grown so confident that she was looking forward to this reunion. Marriage and motherhood must be a fiercely powerful combination, Holly decided. Why had nobody put that in a pill? Those pharmaceutical firms were slacking.

      At school, she and Donna been drawn to each other by virtue of their quietness. They’d never been part of the reckless but popular gang of girls who cheeked the teachers, knew how to roll joints and went to wild parties with wild boys. Holly would have been struck dumb if faced with either a wild boy or a joint. She and Donna spent their school years in the anonymity of being good girls and Holly would have bet a week’s wages that half the girls in the school wouldn’t remember either of them now. Except as the skinny girl with the big glasses (Donna) and the plump, shy youngest sister of the Miller trio. The people she’d really like to see were the other anonymous girls, but they were the very people who probably wouldn’t turn up. Holly tried to remember them: Brona, who spent all her time in the library and Roberta, a terminally shy girl who was forever drawing pictures in a sketch book and who could never look anyone in the eye.

      As the reunion approached, Holly considered coming up with a previous engagement and avoiding it altogether, but then her mother had heard about it (Kinvarra was clearly still a hotbed of gossip where no snippet of information went unrecorded) and had phoned up to make sure she was going.

      ‘Darling, it’ll be wonderful,’ Rose had said. ‘I can still remember Stella’s ten-year reunion.’ Her mother’s voice was wistful. ‘She loved it; and to think it’s coming up to her twentieth. Time certainly flies. Are you going with Donna?’

      ‘Of course,’ Holly said automatically. There was little point in СКАЧАТЬ