The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  “I’d love to have a peek at it after dinner, if you can bear to unwrap it,” Margot said with a wink, and returned to the oven.

  As it was, they finished eating late, after Lila woke up wailing halfway through and refused to go back to sleep.

  It wasn’t until Maggie got home to Tim’s flat that she noticed the radioactive-yellow, turmeric-infused streak that had dripped from Margot’s wooden spoon deep down into the bag and stained one side of the dress that she was supposed to be keeping pristine.

  2

  MARGOT

  When I woke—sweating and gasping for breath, my mouth open in an endless, silent scream—I checked the green numbers on my alarm clock to find out what I already knew: Dawn was still some way off, but for me, morning had broken.

  The dreams were relentless. I needed something, I was looking for something, there was something I had to hand over—whatever it was was always located at the top of a flight of stairs with no end. Sometimes Lila cried at the bottom while I drove myself upward to the summit. That variation was particularly hard. Sometimes I was carrying Jack, with his bloody nose and his rabbit, tripping as I climbed and terrified to drop him. That version was even worse.

  They had ebbed a little, the dreams, and the intensity had briefly lessened. I had begun to feel a little less glue-eyed in the mornings; my heart shuddered less throughout the day. But they had picked up again since I’d found the photo on the computer, since I’d received the picture from Winnie. There had been no reply to the message I had sent in return.

  Four fifty-one A.M.

  I had failed to delete my Facebook and Instagram accounts. After the violent shock of little Jack’s image on the computer screen, I had reeled back downstairs in search of more wine. My resolve had weakened and I quickly slipped back to checking them frequently. I did so now, with my husband asleep in the dark next to me. I could hear Lila snuffling gently in her room down the corridor.

  The two of them, Maggie and Winnie, were so constantly prominent in my mind—as they had been for the best part of a year, unknowingly intertwined with me at the center of the Venn—that I failed, initially, to understand the top post on my screen even as I read it several times over.

  “Maggie Beecher and Winnie Clough are now friends.”

  After Helen, I had spoken to a woman called Sheila, who wore a gray linen shirt decorated with a floral brooch, once a week for what felt like long enough to make up a decade.

  “And what emotion did that make you feel?” Sheila would ask me, as though feelings could be codified like colors, selected from a pack like felt-tips.

  Sadness. Doubt. Isolation. Fear. I intoned them now, although I hadn’t seen Sheila for as many years as I had accrued at the time of our regular appointments.

  I looked at the words on my phone screen again, as if from a depth below them. I felt a cold, heavy jacket of iron being shrugged around my shoulders by an invisible hand.

  “Acknowledge it and move through it,” Sheila recommended, but Sheila didn’t really know, hadn’t really understood what it was I was dealing with—as a witness, yes, but also the reason why what happened had happened. I was as guilty of causing Helen’s fall as if I’d pushed her myself.

  I put my phone down again. I knew then that the worry and fatigue I would feel all day was nothing I could blame on Lila, who had begun—after that one disturbed dinner with Maggie and Tim—dozing without a murmur for twelve hours straight each night.

  Later that morning, after Lila’s clockwork routine of breakfast-nappy-nap-nappy was complete, I strapped her into the buggy with the plan of walking to the park. Fresh, cleansing air for both of us: The bright, cold, sunlit day steamed my breath when I stepped out of the house.

  As I wrangled the pushchair over the lip of our front door and then down the step onto the path, I heard something crack and crunch under its rubber tires. Lila was used to being jostled as we made our exit; it was an awkward maneuver performed several times a day as we came and went. Today, though, there was something in our way.

  Nick and I were no longer surprised by the infinite variety of detritus that was regularly tossed over our garden hedge by passersby—it was part of living in the sort of London neighborhood that was still only halfway to what it eventually might be. Schoolkids ditched their fried chicken bones sometimes, unlucky gamblers their betting slips. I once, through our bedroom shutters, watched an after-hours drunk sit on our wall and mix himself a drink at midnight, singing all the while, and came down the next morning to find an empty vodka bottle still sitting there, as if waiting for a bartender to clear it away. Soon after we moved in, someone jettisoned a leather briefcase full of porn mags in our flower bed, and we entertained ourselves with the notion that our front gate had been the setting for a pervert’s Damascene moment.

  I couldn’t see what today’s discarded item was from above, but the hard shell of it screeched along the paving slab as I wheeled the buggy round to look underneath. At first I thought it was some giant, wounded insect and recoiled in horror: Its shimmering black innards were unspooled on the ground beneath the mesh shopping basket that hung under the baby’s seat.

  It had been so long since I’d seen one that it took a few moments before I realized what I was looking at. The shiny black intestines were surrounded by crystalline crumbs of plastic: I had crushed and inadvertently disemboweled an old cassette tape. I heard in my mind the click of the deck opening, the rattle and slide of the cassette into the chamber, and the clunk of its closing again, and felt nostalgia wash over me. In my current state, I was sympathetic to an artifact that had been nudged out by something newer and shinier.

  As I bent to pick up the pieces, though, the feeling ossified into a cold, beating heaviness. A crescent moon sticker, yellow stars, a red cartoon guitar. A handwritten label now smudged and faded. I stared at the holographic ribbon wrapped around my fingers as though it were blood on my hands.

  This was one of our mixtapes. One of the compilations Winnie and Helen and I had made for one another at school. From the indistinct blue ink, it looked like one of the new girl’s.

  Are you back?

  I was in the canteen again, waving up at the girl on the balcony.

  I tumbled from my crouch backward against the front step, and its concrete edge struck me painfully in the lower back. A cool sweat sprang up on my upper lip, my temples, my palms; my eyes strained over the metallic cat’s cradle strung out between my hands. I leaned sideways to spit out the bile that had collected behind my teeth.

  This wasn’t Helen. This was Winnie.

  This was a warning.

  A plane passed overhead, and Lila mewed at it.

  I caught her navy blue eyes over the handrail of her pushchair, smiling but questioning. In an instant, I was back on my feet to reassure her, cooing as I rubbed my wet chin with my sleeve and shook the black lacing from my hands. I dropped the plastic case onto the ground once again and ground it viciously under my heel; I would clear it up later, before Nick got home.

  I set off for the park, with the feeling I had been assaulted. The past I had tried so hard to slam the door on had been brought to my front step.

  I would tell Nick about Maggie and Winnie when he got home from work. I would tell him all about the selfie, Facebook, the photo on the computer screen. He hadn’t mentioned it, but he must have seen it too. The mixtape I would keep to myself; it required more backstory than I was willing to give.

  I got as far as telling him that Maggie had met a woman in the café when she was looking after Lila.

  “Isn’t that great?” my husband said robotically, staring at the television screen as he scooped the vegetables I had roasted into his mouth. “Maggie’s really getting to know the area. Tim’s pumped that she’s spending so much time here—he thinks she might even want to move down this way.”

  “But the woman—” I stutt
ered. “Maggie didn’t—It wasn’t what it sounds like—”

  Nick reluctantly turned his head toward my end of the sofa, his expression carefully blank and the warmth in his eyes shut down.

  “Please don’t,” he said simply. He looked at the fork in his hands and cleared his throat. “Please, ’Go, not tonight.”

  “Why aren’t you on my side?” I whined, high-pitched and sad.

  “I’m always on your side, Margot. But I don’t want you to upset yourself.” He lifted a hand to place it on my arm, but I jerked it away before his fingers landed.

  In the old days, if I didn’t talk for a while, Nick would always ask me what was wrong. We both knew I used silence as a punishment, an icy reproach. It had been his job after arguments or disagreements to coax me back into speaking again. Now I felt his straining every nerve not to. I could sense his relief when nine-thirty ticked round and he was able to stretch his long arms over his head, announce he couldn’t keep his eyes open and was going to bed.

  By the time I had finished the washing up and looked in on Lila as she snored softly, Nick was asleep. At least, he was still and his side of the bed was in darkness. I would need to find a different way of getting my message across.

  The weekend after Tim’s work do, the four of us met in the café by the park to warm our hands on cups of coffee after a stint of pushing Lila on the swings. Nick and Tim had texted the plan into existence by themselves; by the look on Maggie’s face, she had been hoping to have her boyfriend to herself for the morning.

  “How did the dress go down?” I twinkled at her when we arrived, carefully wiping my features of anything that might be construed as knowing.

  “I wore something else in the end,” she said briefly, and I imagined the substantial—and specialist—dry-cleaning bill she must have had to foot.

  “We had an amazing time though,” she continued, excited at the memory, and I tried to square the fact that I was pleased for her—this woman so clearly, so happily, in love—with how furious she regularly made me feel in the middle of the night.

  I even laughed when she played an elaborate game of peekaboo with Lila across the table.

  “She’s so good with Lila, isn’t she?” I said while Maggie was using the bathroom. Nick and Tim both smiled at me, the former glad to hear me talking Maggie up, the latter smug and eagerly lapping up praise for his beloved.

  I sipped my coffee and went on. “She keeps telling me how keen she is to have one of her own. In fact, she said she’s moving in soon. Things have really sped up between you two!”

  I pretended not to see Nick raise his eyebrows at me but felt a kick of triumph deep in my stomach when Tim seemed a little distant on Maggie’s return.

  3

  WINNIE

  I played my part in it, but I was only sixteen too, remember. I didn’t know any better, either.

  I thought, after Jack, that I could end it. That I could end the friendship that had eaten away so much of my humanity over the years and left me saddled with this needy, neurotic woman who was always so desperate for my approval—and my forgiveness. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t bear to see her with her own baby, happy and complete, it was that I began to have dark thoughts about what I might be able to make happen.

  Where would that baby go if an old crime were reported and Margot was taken in for questioning? Who would be a better person than the mother’s oldest friend to help bring the child up if the old blackmail began to take its toll on her mental state once again? The possibility was so intoxicating I thought about it all day long as I sat in my rocking chair, looking out at the garden and enjoying the medicated numbness in which I now passed the time.

  What did I owe Margot, after what she had done?

  4

  MAGGIE

  Maggie was doing yoga on a lake when she saw Nick’s number flash up on the screen of her phone, so she couldn’t pick up right away.

  She got several such invitations every day—yoga on a lake, dinner at the top of a skyscraper, private screenings of blockbuster films that other people had to watch with the noisy masses—and she said yes to as many of them as possible, provided they didn’t get in the way of seeing Tim. Maggie was all too aware that they’d dry up once she was out the door at Haute.

  As the seasons changed, away from the harshness of winter and into the sociable warmer months, the anniversary of Maggie’s first day approached and with it, the prospect of her last. Now she knew how a king feels, weary with the knowledge that his heirs are waiting for him to die.

  Maggie had grown used to living in the moment so that she didn’t have to think about the future. That evening would be the first weather that was mild enough to sit outside and drink in; perhaps the girls from the office would be up for a few. It had been a while since she’d cemented her friendship with them.

  The last time they’d gone out together—it must have been a month or so ago—a bottle of wine chilling in an ice bucket, coats thrown over the backs of their chairs, and the niggles of the office forgotten, they talked about the fact Maggie’s time at Haute was in its final trimester. They’d laughingly appropriated the language of pregnancy last time they’d gone for drinks, not out of disrespect to Margot but simply because the security guard Clive always referred to Maggie as “the maternity.” It was better than “the new girl,” she supposed, which she had been for the first six months.

  “Where’s this package for the maternity going?” he’d ask in broad Cockney to the girls even though Maggie was sitting there, right in front of him and his little trolley.

  She’d been riled by it at first, seeing in it the projected conspiracy against her and in favor of Margot that had tainted much of her early time in the office thanks to her own paranoia. More recently Maggie had realized Clive was just a bit shy of her.

  Holly and Amma were sad at the prospect of her leaving but too professional—or loyal—to say anything about Margot’s return or whether Maggie might stay. Just as Margot and she felt too awkward to ever really acknowledge the delicate equilibrium between them, so the girls were faintly mortified by it, too. Maggie felt the humiliation most keenly, of course—that one day she’d be there and the next, finished with, like an old issue that had been read and discarded.

  Unlike Holly and Amma, Maggie hadn’t got drunk that night. No longer being single had worked wonders for her alcohol consumption, she had to say. She couldn’t bear the idea of Tim’s seeing her stumble into his flat the way she used to claw her way through the door to hers and Cath’s. In fact, she spent most of the evening counting down the moments until she could leave to go and see him.

  Maggie had sometimes wondered whether she was keeping up her own social life purely for the superficial effect of appearing to have better things to do than spend all her time with Tim. But that was before Winnie.

  When the two of them had met in the pub last week, they had had the sort of evening, the sort of chat, that only happens at the very beginning of a friendship: one that darted all over the place so quickly as they found common touchstones and shared interests that they never really finished a sentence or rounded off a topic properly.

  Winnie was charming, funny, thoughtful, clever. She was deeply magnetic without being overbearing. But there was something closed about her. As quickly as conversation flowed, Maggie was unable to get a question to her companion, who deflected them like rain off a windscreen with yet more of her own. Winnie might have been the life and soul of the wooden booth they shared that night, but she refused to let Maggie anywhere near either of hers.

  When her alarm had gone off the next morning, head throbbing and mouth dry from having drunk too much in her excitement, Maggie hoped she hadn’t prattled on about herself for too long: She had a tendency to boast when she’d had a few. She scarcely knew anything about Winnie’s home life, other than the fact she was married and on some sort of sabbati
cal from her job in a gallery. She’d left with the feeling that they had so much more to discuss.

  Now, as she downward-dogged on a pontoon that bobbed with every stretch on the murky water of the Serpentine (the floating aspect was supposed to make for better energy flow), Maggie wondered what it was Nick had to say to her. She didn’t really want to have a conversation with him about how she thought his wife was going not-so-gently bonkers; she wanted as little of it as possible to be traced back to her, if she was honest. Maggie was rather concerned about its seeming as though—in Margot’s mind, anyway—her maternity cover was the one wielding the knife, so to speak.

  As it turned out, he just wanted to see whether Maggie was available on Friday night.

  “Please feel free to say no, but I’d really like to take Margot out for dinner,” he explained when she called him back, his usually mellow voice uncharacteristically spiky and forced. “I think it’d be good for us to get out for the night, try to feel like ourselves again. And you’re so great with Lila—it would be perfect if you could do it.”

  Friday, Friday. She mentally scanned the blue-paged, gilt-edged, leather-bound diary she’d bought herself with her first month’s pay from Haute. She’d already accepted an invitation from a big designer brand to go and see the new musical that everybody was raving about—not because she particularly enjoyed the genre, but because it was so impossible to get tickets to it that even an Instagram shot of the stubs was bound to inspire jealousy—and likes!—in most quarters.

  Perhaps she could still post that picture and just not actually go. She’d be doing Nick a favor, and that would keep him on her side, make him more likely to persuade Margot she wasn’t a threat at work, to tell Tim that she was the One. After another weekend spent at her boyfriend’s flat and exploring the surrounding neighborhood, Maggie was feeling with an ever sharper urgency that this was the place for her.