River Deep

by Rowan Coleman

  Maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough. Maybe he was taking the whole experience for granted, counting down the days to his interview at Magic Shop which was now only four days away. Today, he decided, he was going to try harder. He was going to get all Robin Williams on their arses and be inspirational. Make them stand on their desks and shout carpe diem or something along those lines.

  Pete felt his stomach tighten when he imagined this, so he dismissed the thought and instead concentrated on Stella. He still hadn’t heard from her. His seriously flawed plan to impress her with tales of a potential love rival, which had seemed so sane when he was drunk, grew ever more ridiculous as his multiple hangovers gradually receded. Did he think he was in some stupid bloody romantic comedy? The kind that Sandra Bullock was always in, the sort that was all dialogue and no decent effects. Plans like his only worked in the movies, and besides, he wasn’t any good at being devious.

  As it turned out, he hadn’t even needed to engineer a meeting with Maggie. He’d bumped into her again on Tuesday, purely coincidentally, in Marks & Spencer. He’d been trying to buy a blouse for his mum’s birthday in his lunch hour (hours, actually – the college job wasn’t all that taxing). He’d cornered an assistant but, for some reason, the more he’d tried to explain what he was after the more she’d turned red and started to sort of, well … tremble.

  ‘She’s sort of this big.’ Pete gestured vaguely in front of him, wondering if she was having trouble with his accent. ‘And she likes flowery stuff. Stuff with flowers on.’ He waited for the girl to speak. ‘Have you got any flowery stuff?’ he reiterated, but she just stared at him like a rabbit trapped in headlights. He was just about to give up and go and buy some chocolates when Maggie appeared at his shoulder.

  ‘Hi? Pete?’ She glanced curiously at the tremulous assistant. ‘What are you doing?’

  Pete sighed with relief. ‘I’m trying to buy a blouse for my mum, for her birthday. I thought I’d make a special effort as I won’t be there this year. But I don’t know her size and this young lady seems to be unable to help me.’ Pete caught Maggie repressing a smile. ‘What? Am I being an idiot?’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘Only a bit.’

  She smiled at the girl, who was edging away, hopeful that she would regain the power of speech when she was out of sight of the most gorgeous bloke she had seen in ages. She just had to tell Maxine, and maybe both of them could have a peak at him through knitwear and casual cotton-mix.

  Pete watched her bolt towards a Staff Only exit and cursed himself.

  ‘She thought I was a flipping trannie, didn’t she?’ he asked Maggie with horror.

  Maggie snorted a very unladylike and quite charming laugh.

  ‘Well, you did look a bit suspicious. What’s she like?’ Maggie asked, thumbing through the racks of clothing. ‘Is she bigger than me, say?’

  Pete looked at the top of Maggie’s head.

  ‘Much,’ he said thinking of his mum’s broad bust and solidly cushioned hips. ‘Like, really much.’

  Maggie stopped and smiled up at him, shaking her head.

  ‘You can’t really guess women’s clothes sizes, Pete. It’s a minefield. If what you give her is too small, she’ll be embarrassed and feel fat, and if what you give is too big, she’ll be mortified that you think she’s that big and feel fat. See what I mean?’

  Pete shook his head and then nodded. ‘I don’t think my mum cares either way, but I get your point. I’ll bear it in mind for the future. I’d better buy her some chocolates.’

  Maggie laughed at him again, in a friendly sort of way, but he was offended.

  ‘No, chocolate will melt in the post! Buy her some vouchers. Basically, all a woman ever wants for presents is expensive jewellery and vouchers to her favourite shop. It’s a simple but somehow elusive concept for most men.’

  Pete grinned at her.

  ‘Actually, with Stella it’s just the jewellery.’

  And they’d chatted while they stood in the unfeasibly long queue full of old ladies. It must have been pension day. Pete had said something along the lines that this town clearly wasn’t big enough for the both of them as they kept running into each other, and Maggie had said that sometimes this town didn’t feel big enough to swing a cat in. She told Pete that if he stayed here he’d soon find that out. He asked her why she stayed then, and she said because she’d been everywhere else and she wasn’t that fussed. They laughed and chatted and exchanged ‘my mum’s as batty as a fruit cake’ stories. That was until he realised she was holding a five-pack of black thongs in her hands. After that it was she who chatted, while he tried not to look at them. When it was time for them to part, she’d hesitated before saying, ‘Got time for a coffee?’

  Pete was unexpectedly pleased at the invitation, and anyway he had another hour before his afternoon lecture, so he’d agreed. Now, as he got ready for work, he smiled at the memory. It had been a laugh, that cup of coffee that had turned into a pint with Maggie. They had talked about Stella and her bloke – Christian, was it? She seemed to know what he was going through, and she’d made him smile and even laugh. Actually, really, really laugh like a demented fool. She was a funny girl, and a nice one. He didn’t think it would be fair to use her to make Stella jealous. At least not now in the sober, more or less reasonable, light of day.

  In any case, now he was worrying for a whole new set of reasons. What if Stella had read that last email and thought he didn’t want her any more? What if his attempt to sound happy and successful had made her think he didn’t need her any more, that he wasn’t waiting for her? What if – Pete swallowed hard – he had been wrong to let her go? What if she had found someone over there already? Someone better than him. Pete had always known that you couldn’t keep Stella if she wanted to go, but this time, especially after all the things they’d said to each other, after all the promises they’d made, his raised expectations made her absence harder to bear. He missed her so much that the pain seemed to grate at his edges, making him tender and sore all over, bruising him the instant he touched the hard possibility that she might never come back. Pete shook his head firmly. No, she had his ring. She was coming back. She’d promised.

  As he turned into the kitchen, he stopped dead in his tracks, opened and closed his mouth a couple of times and then shuffled and coughed. But it seemed that neither Angie, who was sitting on Falcon’s lap and kissing him deeply, nor Falcon, who had his hand thrust very far up her nightshirt, revealing a large expanse of wide white thigh, noticed Pete’s attempts to make his presence felt. Pete stood frozen by uncertainty for a couple of seconds until Falcon’s hand finally released Angie’s breast, and then headed purposefully between her thighs. Pete had been wondering about the exact nature of their relationship. At least that was cleared up.

  ‘Coffee anyone?’ Pete said brightly, making both parties jump apart.

  Angie pulled her nightshirt belatedly over her knees and giggled. Falcon wiped his hand across his damp mouth.

  ‘Oh dear, we’ve been caught out!’ Angie said smoothing Falcon’s pink hair back from his face. Falcon caught Pete’s eyes over her shoulder and winked. ‘You must wonder what on earth’s going on, Pete,’ Angie said.

  Pete shook his head. ‘It was fairly obvious, actually,’ he said, spooning instant coffee into three mugs.

  Angie looked at Falcon. ‘I said we couldn’t keep it a secret for very long with Pete in the house, didn’t I?’ Falcon gave her an uneasy shrug. ‘Well, Malcolm and I …’

  Pete turned to look at the couple, a small smile beginning in the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Malcolm?’ he said, looking at Falcon, the smile spreading into a grin.

  ‘Well, yes, Falcon is just a pen name, isn’t it, darling? Didn’t you know?’ Falcon glowered at Angie, who wound her plump arm a little tighter round his neck and planted a kiss squarely on his forehead.

  ‘We’ve had a bit of an on-off thing going for, oh, a couple of years now. Sort of a friendship with added extr
as now and then. Perfect arrangement, really. Anyway, I hope we don’t disturb your sleep!’

  Angie giggled and hopped off Falcon’s lap, picking up her steaming coffee mug as she went.

  ‘I’m going for a shower. See you later, lover!’ She practically skipped out of the kitchen and thundered up the stairs.

  Pete looked at Falcon.

  ‘We’re mates. Sometimes we fuck. There’s no emotional shit and everyone’s happy. It’s all good.’

  Pete considered whether such an arrangement was really possible, and then supposed it must be. Falcon had found nirvana. He raised a bloke’s eyebrow, one that said, ‘I don’t care if you don’t want to elaborate.’

  Falcon returned the gesture with a bloke’s ‘shit happens’ shrug, and the subject was cleanly, quietly and quickly closed.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Pete thought, ‘it’s great being a man.’

  The companionable silence continued as Pete shoved his washing into the ancient machine and nicked some of Angie’s soap powder.

  ‘Right, I’m off,’ he said as he headed towards the door. ‘Have a good day, Malcolm.’

  Falcon replied with a bloke’s grunt. It was a grunt that said, ‘Call me that again and I’ll lamp you.’

  Pete smiled to himself as he glanced up at the faultlessly blue sky. It was going to be another very hot day. He steeled himself and headed towards the college.

  ‘Carpe diem,’ he mumbled to himself.

  He was depressed to note that he didn’t sound that convinced.

  Maggie eyed herself in her wardrobe mirror and held her hand out forcefully, trying to ignore the Jason Donovan sticker that still reposed in the top right-hand corner, seemingly winking at her.

  ‘Mr Shah, hi. Great to see you again. I think you’ll find the plans we’ve got for The Fleur are really exciting …’

  She trailed off and took a step closer to the mirror. She studied her eyes – still a little shadowed but not so red-rimmed, with the hint of a sparkle just waiting to be ignited. She turned her face from side to side and stretched her skin a little over her cheekbones. Still reasonably elastic, she thought. The unremitting sun had coloured even her fair skin a little and brought out a flowering of light freckles across her nose. Christian had always liked her freckles. He said they were natural and sweet.

  She tucked her hair behind her ear and smoothed down her smart meetings-at-the-bank shift dress and smiled at herself, then laughed and pirouetted around and around on the spot, her fingers outstretched until the room span faster than she did and she had to collapse on to the bed and wait for the world to slow back down. When the corners of the room reinstated themselves in their rightful order, she sat up gingerly, took a deep breath and began to pack her briefcase, carefully putting the four copies of her business plan on the top, along with her pen, calculator and phone. She wanted everything in easy reach. Whatever the rest of the day might bring, would bring, she had to make sure she did the best job she could today at the bank. The best job for her parents, for Sheila and – she considered with a smile – for herself. An independent woman running her own business.

  Maggie stopped stock-still and closed her eyes. She felt her stomach bubble up with happiness and her fingertips fuzz with magical anticipation. She felt powerful and beautiful and really much more like running naked through a field of waist-high wild flowers than sitting in a bank meeting. Because this part of her life, this chapter of misery, was almost, almost over. Her plan had worked much better than she had ever imagined, and tonight she was going to see Christian. Tonight her life was going to start again.

  At first she’d thought that going to see Louise was the worst mistake she had ever made. On her way back from the meeting she’d felt sort of high and giggly, as if she had the most wonderful secret power that no one else knew about. As soon as she got off the train she headed straight over to Sarah’s to tell her all about it. Then, as she rehearsed the conversation in her head, she realised that Sarah would go ballistic and that, what’s more, she’d look at her in that way she had recently, as if she might be a little bit unbalanced, a little bit more than was normal, at least. She’d realised that the last thing she wanted to do was tell Sarah that she’d met Louise, posed as a client and thrown a hefty spanner in the workings of hers and Christian’s relationship. She stopped dead in her tracks and turned round.

  As she headed back to The Fleur, she realised she didn’t want to tell anyone what she’d done to Louise, which meant that not only was she aware of how insane it might seem to anyone in the world who was not in love with Christian, but she also felt bad about it. Which, on the bright side, meant that she wasn’t the heartless sociopath Sarah seemed to think she was. But on the downside, she’d done something really, really terrible that even she was finding a little tough to justify. She tried to console herself with the fact that Louise had stolen Christian from her in the first place, with her cleavage and her bum and her ‘Oh, aren’t I sweet’ demeanour. But then she remembered Louise telling her that she hadn’t known about Christian’s girlfriend, that he’d come on to her from the outset. And worse still, Maggie knew it was impossible to resist Christian when he was on a full-on charm offensive. She didn’t really blame Louise. In fact a large part of her had wanted to fess up almost straightaway and settle down to a good girly session of comparing notes.

  Maggie had never been a conniving, manipulative bitch before, and she was surprised by how awful it made her feel. She just hoped that she was so bad at it that it wouldn’t count in the scheme of things, not really.

  For a week she waited for the fall-out from her despicable actions with literally bated breath. She accompanied Sheila on trips to her solicitor and then to her bank. She helped her mum and dad go through piles and piles of endless papers, trying to organise a filing system that hadn’t been touched in maybe ten years, until at last she found all the documents they needed to transfer the business into her name. In the end they decided that the deeds to the actual building should remain in her parents’ names. Maggie would lease it from them at a discounted rate, but still enough to give them an income.

  ‘That way,’ Keith said, looking at each of his children in turn, ‘when your mum and I are gone you’ll have half of this place coming to you each. That could be a lot of money.’

  ‘That is, if Maggie doesn’t get it repossessed in the meantime,’ Jim said.

  ‘I won’t if you pull your bloody finger out and try earning your half,’ Maggie retorted. She shook her head and wondered what had happened to their relationship over the years. For a long time they had been cohorts, each other’s protector and friend, and then when she’d left for university they’d started to drift apart until they hardly talked, and when they did it was the kind of angry childish exchange they had never had as children.

  She tried her best to concentrate purely on her meeting with Mr Shah at the bank and block everything else out of her head, but it seemed almost impossible. All the planning, all the work that needed to be done seemed like an irritating distraction from her real business, the business of getting Christian back. She constantly had to remind herself how important it was that she got everything right.

  Then she realised it had been a week since she’d visited Louise and nothing had happened. There she was, trembling with fear over her deeply suspicious actions, and it had all come to nothing. She felt secretly embarrassed, relieved and distraught in turn. It might have been a terrible plan, but at that point it had been her only one. If Christian gave in to Louise’s demands, then it meant he really had left Maggie behind; it meant she was out of his heart permanently.

  To take her mind of it, and realising she had less than a week until her meeting with Mr Shah, she finally gave her business plan for The Fleur her full attention. Gradually, as she went over and over the figures and her presentation in her head, she began to realise she could make it work. She could make The Fleur into something exciting, new and, what’s more, profitable. She’d started to feel a sense o
f purpose and control that she hadn’t felt since … Maggie couldn’t remember when. It was only a small beginning, but it was like a sort of anaesthetic, a way to numb the pain that had been unrelenting until that moment.

  On Wednesday morning she realised, as she rifled through her suitcase, that she’d run out of clean underwear. She’d put a load on the day before but she’d forgotten to collect it and drape it over her windowsill to dry in the sun. She contemplated the prospect of clammy knickers and, after a morning in her pyjamas, set out commando-style to M&S to buy some more. A girl can never have too many knickers. She drifted through the rails of clothing, wondering if Louise had taken her advice at all and, if she had, wondering how Christian had reacted. She was picturing him sheltering Louise against his chest and stroking her hair, murmuring something along the lines of, ‘Of course that wizened old hag means nothing to me! I shall never speak her name again!’, and was just about to torture herself with the thought of them kissing when she caught sight of Pete, and just in time too. He’d been reducing the teenage assistant to a pool of liquid hormones.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said to him. They had quite a laugh in M&S and, reluctant to go back to the dense heat of the pub and work, Maggie had thrown caution to the wind and asked him for a coffee. They were talking so much they walked right past two cafés and, rather than turn round, plumped for a drink in The Blacksmith’s Arms instead.

  ‘Still no news from Stella?’ Maggie asked Pete as he sat next to her. She wanted him to be happy but was sort of glad that there was one other person in the universe as unjustly miserable as her.

  Pete’s shoulders dropped and his smile disappeared.

  ‘Nope. And it’s been ages now since she went. I mean, we’re supposed to be getting married – you’d have thought she would have called or found time to email or something.’ Pete frowned hard at the polished surface of the table. ‘What does it mean, Maggie? Does it mean that everyone else is right and I’m a twat?’ he looked up at her. ‘I don’t want to be a twat.’