Maggie found a piece of string, got Sadie to tie a piece of driftwood to it and started dragging it up and down the beach. Grains of sand flew onto Sadie’s book.
‘Maggie, careful!’
‘It’s my tiny dog called Tiny and I’m taking it for a walk.’
‘Don’t take it too far. Only as far as the five trees. And make sure you can see me the whole time, okay?’
‘Okay.’
Maggie made all sorts of shapes in the sand as they walked along. She picked up shells, four red ones and six white ones, and put them in her pocket. She looked back every time to make sure she could see Sadie. She had just counted the five trees and was turning Tiny around to head back when she heard her name.
‘Maggie? Maggie Faraday? Is that you?’
It was the lady. She came closer and leaned down, smiling. ‘It is you. Maggie, I’m Lucy. Do you remember, I worked in the library at your school last term?’
‘Hi, Lucy.’
‘I didn’t know you were up here on holiday too.’
‘I’m here with my auntie Sadie.’ She pointed to Sadie down the beach. It looked like she was reading. ‘Mum’s sick in hospital at the moment so we’re having an adventure.’
‘Your mum’s in hospital? What’s wrong with her?’
‘Something bad. She coughs a lot.’
‘That’s terrible. I hope she gets better. We’re heading back to Hobart tomorrow so I might call in and visit her.’
‘You won’t be allowed to. She’s too sick.’
‘I’ll drop her some flowers then.’
By the time Maggie got back to where Sadie was sitting she had found ten pink shells, nine black shells and four pieces of seaweed. She could hardly carry them and Tiny at the same time.
Sadie started laughing when she saw her struggling with everything. ‘Haven’t you done well! Will we make a picture?’
They had so much fun making the picture that Maggie forgot to tell her about the lady from Hobart.
Two nights later she and Sadie were sitting by the little fire outside their caravan, pushing foil-wrapped potatoes around in the coals with long sticks.
There’d been another letter from her mother that day. Maggie had asked how the postman found them and Sadie said that postmen were amazing. They always knew where to find people.
They’d just eaten the potato, right out of the blackened foil, adding lots of butter so it ran all over their fingers, when Maggie heard her name being called. She thought it was the lady from yesterday at first. She and Sadie both looked up. Then she realised who was shouting. It was her mum. Her mum!
‘Maggie! Maggie!’
It was her mum. Running across the lawn, in between all the other caravans. And not only that, Tadpole was behind her, running as well!
Maggie leapt up. ‘Mum! Sadie, look!’ She started to run. Sadie grabbed her arm.
She pulled away. ‘Sadie, look, it’s my mum. Let go.’
She started running. Her mum was running towards her too. Clementine was crying. Maggie started to cry too. She met her in the middle of the lawn, near the taps. Before she knew what was happening Clementine had pulled her up off the ground, into her arms, squeezing her so hard it hurt, saying her name over and over again. ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.’
‘Mum, you’re hurting me.’
She didn’t let go of her. ‘Maggie, are you all right? Are you okay? Is everything all right?’
Maggie pulled back a little bit. It was her mum! ‘Are you better? Has your cough gone?’
‘Are you okay, Maggie? Are you okay?’
She nodded. Of course she was. Maggie couldn’t work out why she kept asking her that. Her mum had been sick, not her. She clambered down out of her arms and took Clementine by the hand, skipping now she was so excited. ‘Come and see our caravan.’
Maggie looked towards the fire. Tadpole was already there, standing next to Sadie. They weren’t laughing or talking. Tadpole had Sadie’s arm in his hand, holding her. Then something strange happened. Her mum took her by the shoulders, said to her in a funny voice, ‘Stay here, Maggie.’ As Maggie watched, Clementine walked up to Sadie and hit her, on her face, then on her body, then on her face again. Not just once. Again and again, until Tadpole stopped her.
Maggie couldn’t believe it. She had never seen her mum hit anyone. She started to cry. ‘Mum, don’t!’
Tadpole appeared next to her. He leaned down and swung her up into his arms. ‘Come with me, little Maggie.’
Maggie was still crying. She tried to look over his shoulder but Tadpole moved her around and she couldn’t see them any more.
Tadpole kept walking with her, down towards the beach, rubbing her back and saying, ‘Shh, shh, shh. It’s all right, Maggie. It’s all right.’
‘But why did Mum hit Sadie, Tadpole?’
‘Don’t you worry about that.’ He hugged her tightly again. It hurt as much as her mum’s hug had. ‘Are you all right, Maggie? Have you been having a good time?’
Maggie nodded. They were on the beach now. He knelt down on the sand, still holding tight to her. She had so much to tell him. She told him about making their hair red and about eating fish fingers. She was halfway through telling him about doing pictures in the sand when she saw a funny look on his face. She thought he would be smiling but he wasn’t.
‘Tadpole, what’s wrong? Are you sad?’
He shook his head. ‘Not any more, Maggie.’
She flung her arms around his neck. ‘I missed you, Tadpole.’
To her big surprise, Tadpole started crying, the tears falling down his cheeks. ‘We missed you too, Maggie.’
PART
TWO
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Greenwich Village, New York, 2006
Maggie Faraday stood in the middle of a small studio apartment, on the sixth floor of a building two blocks north of Bleecker Street. It had been her home for twelve weeks and five days.
‘Nearly there,’ she said aloud, as she gazed around at her morning’s work. She often spoke to herself these days. More worryingly, she also answered herself. She took out a notebook from her jeans pocket and checked her list. Ten tasks done, three to go.
She drew the red curtains, sending a warm cosy glow through the apartment. She’d already finished polishing the old wooden table in the centre of the room. She’d salvaged it from a sidewalk sale the previous week. A local bar had been selling up all its contents. She’d begged help from the Irish barman to carry it up to her apartment, waiting for him to ask her why she wanted an old thing like that, to remark that it didn’t match the rest of the elegant furniture in the living room. All of the things Angus would have said if she’d brought something like it home to their apartment in London. ‘You silly, funny thing,’ he’d have said.
She didn’t think the table was silly or funny. She loved the old look, smell and feel of it. It had scratches on top from bored patrons, as well as scuffs on its legs and edges. She imagined hundreds of conversations, arguments, beginnings and endings of love affairs taking place over it. It reminded her of the old wooden table that had stood in the middle of the kitchen in her family home in Hobart.
‘You’re too sentimental, that’s your problem,’ Angus would have said. ‘That family of yours has a lot to answer for.’
She lit the scented cinnamon candle and placed it in the centre of the table. A pot of mulled wine was simmering on the stove in the small kitchen, sending out a hazy, steamy scent of wine, cloves and spices. Bing Crosby was crooning Christmas carols from the sleek stereo system in a corner of the room. She’d looped tinsel over the curtain rail and hung a slowly spinning three-dimensional foil star from the light fitting. There wasn’t room for much more. It was a tiny apartment. There wasn’t even space for a twenty-four-hour bed – it spent the daylight hours folded up in a large cupboard in the living room.
The apartment had five great things about it. Maggie had counted them:
1 It was safe. Not only was it on the sixt
h floor of the building, but the doorman downstairs was the human equivalent of a suspicious doberman. It had taken her ten minutes to convince him she had a right to move in when she first arrived three months earlier with her one suitcase. He’d asked to see her ID. ‘You don’t look twenty-six,’ he said. ‘Really? Thanks,’ she replied, as though she hadn’t heard that comment a hundred times before.
2 It was quiet. The bars and clubs of Bleecker Street were only metres away, but there was no loud music or shouts from patrons, just the constant humming sound of New York – millions of conversations and car noises softened into an underlying murmur. That had surprised her. She’d expected a soundtrack of car horns, shouts and fights, not that comforting hum.
3 It had a wall of windows. The living room was light-filled, all year round. It meant people could see in if the curtains weren’t drawn, but she could also see out. It was a good exchange.
4 It looked out over the communal park. That had also been a surprise. She’d expected an apartment in New York to look out onto more buildings, concrete and sidewalks, not this oasis. There were many different species of tree, so there was always something in bloom or in leaf. There were also fifteen benches. She’d sat on each of them.
5 It had a balcony. To be accurate, half a balcony, but the dividing wall made it private enough and she rarely heard anything from her neighbour on that side.
There were only three bad things about it:
1 The kitchen was so small there was only room for a two-ring cooker and the larger of the rings was faulty. She’d put in a call to a repair company about it that morning.
2 Her next-door neighbour on the other side was odd. Up at all hours, given to loud conversations with him or herself and addicted to far too many loud game shows on television.
3 The couple down the corridor ate nothing but burgers and chips so there was always a mist of deep-fried fat and meaty smells outside their door. Maggie had started running from her apartment to the lift any time she went out, blocking her nose to avoid the smell.
Five positives, three negatives, so the positives won. It was the way Clementine had taught her to think. Her grandfather Leo’s creed as well. ‘Look on the bright side.’ ‘Count your blessings.’ ‘Things could be worse.’ Could they? Maggie hoped not. She was having enough trouble staying afloat in New York as it was.
‘Think of it as a holiday,’ her aunt Miranda had said when she offered her the use of the New York apartment. ‘A hideaway. Yours, rent-free, flatmate-free.’
Work-free, friend-free, old-life-free. It had seemed like a lifeline at the time, the only option open to her. She needed to leave her house, job, Angus, everything behind. Make a dramatic gesture to try and cancel out a terrible event. The problem was it had come with her. She still thought about it every day. And her head was the same head, her face was the same face, her body was the same body. She was the same person in a different place.
‘You can’t blame yourself, Maggie.’ Everyone had said it to her, from her boss at the company, to Leo, to Clementine, to Juliet, Eliza and Miranda.
But she had to blame herself. Because what the man had done that day was her fault.
If only she had picked up the signs when she was talking to him in the conference-room foyer beforehand. She noticed him as she was making herself a cup of tea. He seemed agitated. She put it down to the bad traffic jams outside. There had been grumbling about long delays and traffic snarls from a lot of the people as they arrived and took their seats in the large hall. She passed him a jug of milk. He mistook her for a waitress. She was used to it. She was always being told she looked like a student. It had become a joke in the firm, to send Maggie into the boardroom first and watch people’s faces when they realised she was the Head of Finance, not the girl hired to wash the cups.
She felt like she had made a connection with him that day. Was it fate that had brought them together even for a few minutes? Could she have stopped him?
Miranda had been impatient about that. ‘How could you have? You’re a mathematical genius, not a psychiatric genius. His own wife said she hadn’t realised how distressed he was.’
Eliza had plenty to say about it too. ‘That was his life path, Maggie. He probably didn’t even notice you.’
Juliet had also tried to console her. ‘Sweetheart, you couldn’t have done anything. He had made his decision. It had nothing to do with you.’
It had everything to do with her. He made it clear when he stood up in front of all the shareholders and said that he was doing this because his livelihood was gone, because some faceless, heartless accountant had decided to close down his business with one stroke of a pen. Before anyone had a chance to stop him, he reached into the bag beside him and —
Even now she couldn’t think of the moment without feeling physically sick. She knew it was her fault. It had been her decision – her work, her analysis of the figures – that had led to his branch of the company being shut down.
‘You were just doing your job,’ Leo had said.
Her job? Then how many times had this happened before without her realising? What she had thought was simply a great skill, something that had enabled her to breeze through school, through university, to be headhunted from job to job – had she been ruining lives all this time? That’s what had kept her awake night after night since it happened. How could she have been so naïve?
Even more naïve to think Angus would support her through it.
‘Look on the bright side,’ Miranda had said. ‘You got two of the bad things that were going to happen to you in your life over in one day. A double whammy, if you like.’
It had felt like a quadruple whammy. Leaving the company offices in a state of shock after what felt like hours of interviews with the police and her employers, wanting nothing more than her own house, her own bed, Angus’s sympathy and support. Getting the black cab to her door, letting herself in, going to his home office and walking straight in on another scene she wanted to forget. Her boyfriend of three years, naked except for his socks, moving energetically on top of a completely naked woman. Not just any woman. A pretty, blonde woman called Lauren, until that moment Maggie’s closest girlfriend in London.
‘At least you did something dramatic about it,’ Miranda said when Maggie told her what happened next. ‘I would have been more upset if you’d just burst into tears in front of them.’
Maggie had screamed and roared and shouted at both of them. She grabbed their clothes and tossed them out of the window. She threw the water from a nearby vase over them.
‘Good thing you don’t keep hydrochloric acid in the house,’ Miranda said.
Maggie grabbed two suitcases, filled them with her clothes and called another black cab. Ten minutes later she found herself sitting in the back of it, trembling with delayed shock, barely able to speak. It took the driver several minutes to find out where she wanted to go. She eventually named a hotel in Mayfair that she remembered from Miranda’s visits to London.
It was only when she entered the hotel room and fell onto the king-sized bed that she allowed herself to cry. Not for Angus. She realised later that not one of the tears that night had been for him. They’d all been for that poor man at her office. She realised then she hadn’t told Angus about him. Two days later, when she had a formal meeting with him to finish everything between them, she still didn’t tell him. She didn’t need to. If he was interested, he could have read about it all in the newspapers. While she and Angus spent a chilly hour disentangling their lives, Miranda waited outside in the limousine she had hired especially for the day, smoking cigarettes and flirting with the handsome thirty-year-old driver. When Maggie eventually emerged carrying a final small bag of belongings, Miranda took her to lunch in the most expensive restaurant she knew in London.
Maggie didn’t know what she would have done without Miranda by her side at that time, or without the phone calls every day from her mother in Tasmania, or the cards and flowers from her other aunts. That tim
e had gone by in a strange haze. It was only now, three months later, that she felt she was slowly getting back to normal.
She hadn’t told any of them, but during her first week in New York she’d barely left the apartment. She was too scared. She found herself in tears nearly every day and kept telling herself off for being so feeble. She found a box of opera CDs in one of the cupboards and played those over and over again, the drama and beauty of the music sparking more crying. She stopped fighting it, and let the tears flow in time to the music.
After six days inside she ventured out into the communal garden. It soothed her to count the trees (there were forty-five) and sit on each of the benches. It wasn’t until the second week that she braved the busy streets and the mysteries of the subway system. It felt good to be surrounded by people again.
She made a list of all there was to see and forced herself to visit at least two sights every day. Back in the apartment at night, she crossed them off her list: the Empire State Building, Carnegie Hall, the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Station, Wall Street, Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty. She joined tour groups, walking tours, read every word of every leaflet, looked up at the skyscrapers, down at the sidewalks, immersed herself in the sights and sounds of yellow cabs, rushing pedestrians, immaculately dressed shoppers, horsedrawn carriages in Central Park.
She collected tiny details, memorising them like mental snapshots. A glint of gold from the roof of the Chrysler Building vivid against a sharp blue sky. A row of six people at a pedestrian light, each with bags in their left hands, talking into phones held in their right hands, like a real-life chorus line from a Broadway musical. A dog-walker in Central Park, two handfuls of hounds dragging her along like a husky team in the North Pole. A fleet of yellow school buses, crammed with well-dressed children from private schools, being directed by a middle-aged woman with a walkie-talkie. She patted the Wall Street bull. She ate three oysters in Grand Central Station. She stared silently at the site of the World Trade Center. She filled her head with Manhattan in the day to help cancel out thoughts of London in the night. She could have written her own tour guidebook: New York City for the Bewildered.
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