by Cathy Kelly
‘All right,’ said Maggie, grinning in spite of herself. ‘Go on, what’s the real reason? You don’t turn up at your cousin’s wedding with a woman no one in your family knows and nobody has ever heard of.’
‘They’re a bit mad in my family,’ Ivan said, with a glint in his eyes. ‘They won’t mind. They’ll be astonished that a jumped-up pump jockey has a date at all.’
Maggie flushed at that, remembering what she’d called him before. She’d better rethink her original evaluation. He was anything but stupid.
‘Are we going to the whole wedding?’ Maggie asked. ‘The church, the dinner, the whole thing? Because if we are and it’s fancy, I have to tell you, I don’t do fancy. I’m more of a jeans woman.’
‘I don’t do fancy very well myself,’ Ivan said gravely. ‘Although I was going to make an exception in this case. Maybe buy a new pair of overalls. But the rock chick look would be fine.’ He flicked an appreciative eye over her outfit, which was Maggie’s standard look of jeans, cowboy boots and a peach-coloured T-shirt that clung to her slim body and showed off the rich russet of her trailing curls. Her new business jacket was slung over one shoulder. ‘Be yourself,’ he said.
Now Maggie really did laugh. ‘Be yourself is one of those things people say when they don’t really mean it and they don’t know what else to say.’
‘No,’ said Ivan, with all seriousness. ‘I mean it: be yourself. What else would you be?’
Maggie thought of all the different people she tried to be in her life. At school, she’d tried to blend in so nobody would notice her. Eventually, she tried to be tough, because invisible hadn’t worked. Tough had been a good compromise. People left you alone if you were a bit tough.
She’d been working that whole ‘don’t mess with me’ phase when she’d met Grey. She toned it down, then, becoming softer, letting her hair grow the way Grey loved. In other words, she’d been what she thought everyone wanted. And here was a man who wanted her to be herself.
Well, she might as well give it a try. After all, she had nothing very pressing to do.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll come with you. Not as a date, right?’ The new improved Maggie, chairwoman of an important committee and worthy foil of politicians, said what she meant these days.
‘No,’ agreed Ivan easily, ‘not as a date.’
Maggie didn’t pursue why he needed somebody at such short notice. There was bound to be a story in it, but she’d find out later. ‘You’ll pick me up then on Saturday?’
‘Your house at two?’ he said.
‘Done,’ Maggie said, ‘and I won’t be wearing a hat.’
‘A hat’s not required.’
For a wedding she didn’t want to go to, where she was going to meet lots of people she didn’t know, Maggie found herself remarkably involved in trying to work out what to wear. On Friday evening, her mother sat on the bed and they went through all the various options.
‘A little dress always works,’ said Shona on the phone earlier when asked for advice, ‘but then you don’t have any little dresses, do you?’
‘Shona, you know my wardrobe,’ Maggie said. ‘The last time there was a little dress in it, I was four. Although Mum probably still has the item in question stuffed up in the attic, I am unlikely to fit into it.’
‘What about the bridesmaid’s dress you wore to my wedding?’
‘There is that,’ Maggie conceded, ‘but it’s very glamorous and over the top for a man I don’t know. I can’t wear that.’
‘Oh God, I don’t know,’ groaned Shona. ‘Ring me when you’re sorting through the clothes and I’ll give advice.’
‘Trinny and Susannah by phone?’
‘Maybe not,’ agreed Shona. ‘Wear lots of lipstick, then. It’ll detract from the jeans.’
‘I have more than jeans, you know. I have other trousers too.’
‘I know, but unless the trousers are part of a chic trouser suit with a matching jacket, then you’re not going to be very weddingy, are you?’
‘What do you think of this?’ Maggie asked her mother, holding up a midnight-blue silk camisole, with sparkly, fake jewels sewn on the front. A thrift-shop purchase, it was a little worn around the edges but Maggie liked it.
‘That’s lovely,’ sighed her mother. ‘It’s pretty. Now, what will you wear with it?’
There followed a big search through the piles of jeans, smaller pile of black trousers and Maggie’s two skirts. One was a distressed velvet affair that had possibly once been brown and was now mottled and faded, in a way that was either fabulously beautiful or totally shabby, Maggie wasn’t sure which.
‘I don’t know about that now,’ said Una doubtfully. ‘If it was fancy dress, that would be great but…Well, try it on anyway and we’ll see.’
‘Cinderella, before the transformation by the fairy godmother,’ Maggie decided, when she’d pulled on the skirt.
‘Oh, now, don’t say that,’ chided her mother. ‘With a bit of make-up and if you curl your hair up, you’ll be the belle of the ball.’
‘Mum, I think that fall affected your brain,’ teased Maggie, stripping off.
Her mother laughed. ‘That’s what your father says. How would he know, that’s what I say! Now look at that lovely skirt.’
She pulled out Maggie’s only other skirt, which Grey had once urged her to buy. A fitted pencil skirt that showed off her long, slim legs, she had worn it only once, for the purpose of Grey removing it.
‘That’d look beautiful on you, Maggie. You never show off your legs.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Maggie reluctantly, because there was a very good reason why she didn’t show off her legs, which was that people would look at them. ‘Anyway, I’ve no tights.’ What would you need tights for if you didn’t wear skirts?
‘I’ll get you some of mine,’ volunteered her mother, hobbling off on her crutches at speed.
Finally, there were the beginnings of an outfit.
Maggie barely recognised this slim girl in the mirror with the long, long legs encased in sheer nylons and the sleek skirt clinging to her hips.
A memory came to her, a harsh, bullying voice telling her she was ugly, a long streak of misery, like a boy. Those taunts had had their effect: for years, Maggie had believed them. And yet now, she looked all right, didn’t she?
‘I suppose a white blouse maybe?’ she said, unsure.
‘You’ll look like a waitress,’ said her mother. ‘No, it has to be colour. What’s wrong with the midnight-blue camisole?’
‘No,’ said Maggie, thinking that she’d look totally unlike herself then with shoulders and throat on show as well as her legs. ‘I wish I had someone to borrow something off.’
‘Pity Elisabeth’s in Seattle,’ said her mother. ‘She always has amazing clothes, all designer stuff too, you know. And if you had kept in touch with some of the girls from school, you’d be able to ring them up and borrow clothes off them too.’
‘Yeah,’ said Maggie shortly. She put the camisole back on.
‘You look beautiful,’ sighed her mother. ‘I’ll get out my marcasite earrings and necklace for you and Ivan won’t be able to take his eyes off you.’
‘He’s only asking me because his date did a runner,’ Maggie pointed out, not entirely correctly. It was what she’d said to her parents to explain how she’d happened to be invited to a wedding by a man none of them knew.
‘Well, it’ll get you out of the house and over that horrible old Grey,’ said her mother, firmly. ‘The louser. If your father ever gets his hands on Grey Stanley, well, let me tell you: we’ll need bail money, that’s all I’m saying.’
Saturday morning in the library flew by. They were incredibly busy and Maggie didn’t have a moment to mull over her pleasure that she had a date for the rest of the afternoon. Still, it was nice to be able to answer, ‘Yes, I’m going out to a wedding,’ when people asked her what she was doing with her half-day off.
Better than saying, ‘No, I’m going to sit a
t home and mope about my ex-boyfriend who bonked someone else.’ Definitely, a social life made you feel more positive. She’d got up early and washed her hair and even put some of that curl separator stuff in, so that it was now lots of rippling, glossy waves, instead of the usual faintly frizzy curls.
‘You look lovely,’ said Tina as they rushed about behind the desk. ‘Is your man from Galway coming back?’
‘No, actually,’ murmured Maggie. ‘It’s a different guy altogether.’
Tina looked impressed. ‘I’m pleased for you. I mean he seemed lovely, your man, and everything, but…’ she stopped.
‘But what?’ asked Maggie, fascinated.
‘He was a bit too pleased with himself, wasn’t he? Those gorgeous fellas always are. No one will ever love him quite as much as he loves himself.’
Maggie grinned. ‘I think you hit the nail on the head there, Tina,’ she said. ‘It’s one thing competing with other women, but you can’t compete with the guy himself, can you?’
‘You said it,’ replied Tina, in a voice that said she knew what she was talking about.
Funny, thought Maggie, turning back to the desk, who would have thought that sedate Tina had a big history of men behind her? But you never knew. Everybody had secrets and dramas in their lives, they just didn’t wear them on their faces.
Maggie had just come back from her coffee break and was making her way back to the library desk, when she realised with a shock that she recognised a woman who had just walked in. Billie Deegan, one of the bullying gang of girls who’d made Maggie’s life hell.
Billie had never been as bad as the gang leader, Sandra Brody. But just seeing her made fifteen years drop away. Maggie felt the way she always had: her intestines literally churning with fear, her heart thumping, her hands clammy.
Billie was holding a small boy’s hand and seemed totally and utterly oblivious of Maggie. Her hairstyle, her expression, were exactly the same as they’d been all those years ago when she’d swiped Maggie’s school bag and tossed it to Sandra, laughing like a hyena as Sandra tipped the contents over the playground.
Unable to stop herself, Maggie ducked in behind a shelf, heart pounding, and listened.
‘Now, love,’ Billie said to the boy, ‘we’ve got to be out of the library in five minutes. Come on, pick a book, will you? We can’t be here all day, we’re going to meet Daddy. He’ll go mad if we’re late, you know what he’s like.’ The boy stood looking lost. ‘Oh, come on now! Hurry up!’
Leaning against a shelf, knowing it was ridiculous to feel the fear still, Maggie lived again those four years of hell. Even now, she couldn’t quite explain how it made her feel, how frightened, how despairing. There was a brief time when Sandra’s game was stealing and vandalising her possessions, when she’d wondered if killing herself was an option.
At least then she wouldn’t be picked on. At least then she wouldn’t wake up on a Monday morning with sheer dread in every atom of her being.
Sometimes now she read articles in the newspaper about bullying. The reporters who had written them had never been victims themselves, she could tell. They wrote about it as if it were a minor blip, something that occurred a couple of hours every day and then you’d move on to another part of your life. Those writers never realised that the bullying became your life, took hold of it, destroyed you.
‘Maggie,’ said Tina loudly, indicating the queue. ‘We need you over here, sorry. I’m on the phone.’
Maggie took a deep breath and almost ran to the safety of the desk. Automatically, she stamped books, smiling at the children and their parents, saying things like ‘The Narnia books are fabulous. I loved them when I was little, still reread them.’
And the children would grin and their parents would grin even more, glad to see their kids reading.
Tina was on the phone again, trying to tell some woman that the Jacqueline Wilson still hadn’t come in. The queue was getting shorter, bringing Billie closer to Maggie.
Get off the phone, please, Tina, Maggie thought in anguish. Please get off the phone and deal with this woman. There were two more to go before Billie and her son now.
Peering up surreptitiously, Maggie watched her. Yes, Billie looked exactly the same, still hard and still with that dead-straight platinum-blonde haircut, probably not dyed at home any more, and the heavy eyeliner ringing her eyes into two cold slits of muddy blue. She and Sandra had been the eyeliner queens of St Ursula’s, even when make-up was forbidden. They hadn’t paid attention to the rules, naturally: rules were for other people.
Her clothes were remarkably normal: a long-sleeved top and pale trousers, none of them ripped or bearing a rude logo. That had been another of Billie and Sandra’s idiosyncrasies. Outside school, they’d favoured tiny T-shirts, ripped leather jackets, tight pale-blue jeans and high-heeled boots. The punk slut look, Maggie’s friend, Kitty, called it.
She and Maggie loved that name: being able to call the bullies something rude. It gave them a tiny, welcome sense of power. It was a shame when Kitty’s family had moved away.
‘Now, Jimmy, give the woman your book and we’ll get out of here,’ said Billie.
Maggie had no option. Keeping her eyes down, she scanned the book number, stamped it and handed it to the child, not saying one word.
‘Thank you,’ the woman said. ‘Jimmy, say thank you.’
Maggie was gobsmacked. Thank you hadn’t been in Billie’s vocabulary when Maggie knew her.
‘Thank you,’ said Jimmy obediently.
He was eight or nine, Maggie reckoned, so Billie must have got pregnant soon enough after they’d left school. For a flicker of a moment, she wondered if Billie’s life had been hard at that time, then dismissed it: Billie Deegan didn’t need her pity.
‘Come on, Jimmy, we’d better go,’ and without exchanging one single glance with Maggie, Billie marched him out of the library.
There was a small stool behind the counter and Maggie sank on to it. Only days before, she’d spoken to Christie Devlin about laying her demons to rest and now, here was one of the bullies in her life. That bitch. Maggie hated her with a venom time hadn’t diminished and, yet, Billie had strolled in happily, smiling, lively, as if she had no idea what she’d done, what she and her mocking pals had done to Maggie’s life. How could she not know?
‘Tina,’ Maggie said urgently, ‘I just feel sick, can I run to the loo for one minute?’
Tina, who had just replaced the phone, nodded. Maggie fled to the staff toilets where she locked herself in a cubicle, sat down on a seat and held her face in her hands. She could feel her cheeks burning and still, that familiar ache in her intestines. Sandra and her cronies had always been a cure for constipation. Rage, anger, impotence and fury flooded through Maggie. Laying your demons to rest was one thing but why now, why today?
Maggie had cleaned up the mascara that she had cried down her cheeks and reapplied more by the time Ivan arrived at the house to pick her up.
‘Hello, Maggie,’ he said, admiring her outfit. ‘You look great.’
He looked pretty good too, all spruced up in a suit and tie.
‘Thanks,’ said Maggie shortly. She had read a book once about accepting compliments and apparently you had to say, ‘Thank you, that’s lovely,’ instead of ‘Oh, this old thing, I’ve had it for a hundred years,’ or ‘My boyfriend gave me this skirt and I never normally wear it.’
They got into Ivan’s car, which was suitably Ivan, being a classic something or other. Maggie knew nothing about cars but it had to be old, what with the ancient dashboard and seats that looked like they came from a 1960s art installation.
He was playing classical music, Dvorák, if Maggie could remember anything from her music classes, a million years ago.
‘That isn’t the music I pictured you listening to,’ she said.
‘No?’ he said good humouredly. ‘What did you think? I’d be a Guns N’ Roses sort of guy, one of those dudes who plays air guitar and dances with his legs spread apart
, shaking his head.’
As this was an accurate assessment of what she’d thought of Ivan the first time she’d met him, she didn’t reply to that but said: ‘Lots of people aren’t into classical music any more.’
‘My mother taught piano,’ he said. ‘I grew up with music. It lifts me.’
‘My dad’s the same,’ she replied. ‘He went through a classical music phase. There were phases for everything. Phases for learning about stars and phases for learning about classical music. He’s into opera too. I quite like it as well, but not played full blast, which is how Dad says you have to play it. His current phase is model-making. Planes and boats.’
‘That sounds nice,’ said Ivan. ‘I like the idea of being a model-maker myself.’
He was easy company, Maggie thought. She didn’t have to make an effort to be scintillating or funny. She just had to be. Sit there in the car and let the conversation roll on, or not, as the case may be. Ivan was quite happy to let the strains of Dvorák glide over them. Undemanding, that was it. Grey had been demanding, she realised suddenly.
She’d never had anything to compare him to but Ivan was so relaxed, the contrast showed Grey up.
‘You’re not quite yourself today,’ Ivan said abruptly, putting the kibosh on the judgement.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked defensively.
‘You’ve been crying.’
She flipped down the passenger visor and looked into the mirror. She’d cleaned away all the mascara, but her eyes were a teeny bit red.
‘Most guys wouldn’t have noticed,’ she said.
‘I’m not most guys,’ he replied. ‘Do you want to talk?’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t.’
But she couldn’t stop thinking about her shock that morning. The worst thing about it was that she had been made to realise that she hadn’t got over being bullied, not one little bit. And that made her conscious that the past would always imprison her unless she did something about it. But what?