Just Between Us

Caroline and Lilli had made a cosy corner of the hotel bar their own, with handbags and jackets marking the spot and a double vodka barely diluted with Diet Coke in front of each of them for Dutch courage. The reunion was taking place in an annexed corner of the hotel restaurant, but the committee hadn’t been able to arrange a private area of the bar, so Caroline and Lilli had come down early to pick a suitable spot for their gang. Even ten years after they’d left Cardinal School, they still thought of their schoolmates as ‘their gang’. Of course, their lives had moved on a lot since then. Caroline had three small children and was a leading light in the Kinvarra Drama Society. Lilli had two little girls and worked part time. Sasha, another gangette, was assistant manager in the local video shop. The other girls, including TV star Michelle, had moved from Kinvarra, and were home rarely, which was why tonight was going to be so exciting: to see how well everyone had done. Lilli and Caroline knew that reunions weren’t really about meeting up with old friends – they were about chalking up the successes and failures of their peers.

Lilli consulted her list. ‘Twenty-five yeses, three nos and two who didn’t reply,’ she said. ‘That’s not a bad tally.’

‘I wonder if Michelle’s had any work done,’ Caroline said, getting stuck into her drink.

‘Definitely not,’ said Lilli knowledgeably. ‘Michelle was always naturally pretty. Her eyebrows are done properly now, that’s it. I don’t believe in plastic surgery myself.’

‘Me neither, of course,’ agreed Caroline, who cherished a long-range plan of having her eyes lifted before they got baggy like her elder sister’s.

‘You shouldn’t tamper with nature,’ Lilli continued, holding her glass with fingers tipped with rock-hard acrylic nails. ‘These don’t count,’ she added hastily, noticing Caroline’s eyes on the acrylic tips. ‘You can’t have decent nails when you’ve got small children.’

A lone woman entered the bar, looking round nervously and clutching a small handbag. Short and thin, she was not dressed in the frontline of fashion and her dark, un-styled hair hung limply to her shoulders. Caroline and Lilli surveyed her.

‘Brona Reilly,’ Lilli whispered to Caroline. ‘She hasn’t changed a bit.’

‘You’d think she’d have made more of an effort for tonight,’ Caroline whispered back. She and Lilli had pulled out all the stops and had made a trip to the city to check out wildly expensive, fashionable looks they could copy. They’d both had their hair and make-up done professionally for the night and Caroline, though she hadn’t told Lilli, had even had a seaweed wrap in Kinvarra’s poshest beauty salon in order to lose a few inches. Her corset-style dress was very unforgiving round the middle.

They pretended they hadn’t seen Brona and watched her go hesitantly up to the bar and order a drink. The reunion might have been about meeting people, but it was important that they were the right people.

Brona had been one of the people that the girls in Michelle’s gang had ignored. Mind you, so had Donna, who was now a friend of theirs. But that was different.

Any mild guilt over how they’d once treated Donna had vanished, because Donna herself didn’t seem to remember it. When Caroline, Lilli and Donna had accidentally met up three years ago at the school gates on the children’s first day, there hadn’t been any bad feeling at all.

‘Imagine, three little girls the same age,’ Donna had sighed. ‘They can go to school and be friends like us.’

Caroline, who was more thoughtful than Lilli, blushed at this, remembering how the more popular girls like herself used to ignore the school mice like Donna except when they wanted to copy their homework. Now that she was a mother herself, Caroline would have personally ripped apart any child who dared to ignore her own beloved Kylie. But Donna clearly had no bad memories of either school or Caroline and Lilli. All was happily forgotten.

‘Would you like to have coffee in my house when we drop the girls off?’ Caroline had said quickly that day, wanting to make amends.

‘That would be lovely,’ Donna smiled.

And that had been the start of their friendship. But despite three years of trying to get them together, Donna had never managed to reintroduce them to Holly.

Both Lilli and Caroline were eager to see what Holly looked like now. Her sister was famous and they were keen to see if any of the gloss of Tara Miller had rubbed off on her. Tara was in the papers occasionally, and had been photographed at several high-profile premieres. Consequently, Holly was more interesting than she had been when she was just one of the quiet, mousy girls in school. Fame by association was better than no fame at all.

Donna revealed that Holly lived in a fabulous apartment in Dublin, had a wonderful job in Lee’s and partied like mad. She also said that Holly looked like a million dollars. Caroline and Lilli, remembering the plump shy girl with the round, earnest face, wanted to see this for themselves.

Donna was frantic by the time she and Holly pulled up outside the hotel at five past eight. ‘We’re so late,’ she shrieked, leaping out of the cab and thrusting a tenner into Holly’s hand. ‘Here’s my share. I have to check in. We were supposed to be here at half seven, the meal will have started five minutes ago and I’ve still got to get changed…’ She fled up the hotel steps into the lobby.

‘What’s the rush?’ said the taxi driver chattily as Holly paid him. ‘When God made time, he made plenty of it. And it’s Christmas: no party starts on time at Christmas. I’d say you’d be lucky if you get your dinner by ten tonight, never mind by eight.’

Holly smiled at him. ‘My sentiments exactly.’ Bunny’s plan for being late had been a good one. When Holly had picked Donna up from the train station and taken her for a pre-reunion drink, she’d assured her that they’d get a taxi to the party and be there in five minutes. Pre-Christmas traffic, driving rain and the mayhem of late-night shopping combined to make it more like forty minutes.

‘Thanks a million,’ Holly said, climbing out of the cab and slamming the door. She moved away and realised that her scarf had got stuck. The driver began to drive off.

‘Stop!’ roared Holly in panic. He slammed on the brakes.

Naturally, her scarf had somehow infiltrated the door locking mechanism and it took five minutes of fervent dragging to disentangle it.

‘Thanks again,’ she said weakly, holding the frayed ends of the scarf and hoping that she could cut off the destroyed bits. At least it hadn’t been the corset.

In the hotel, Donna had checked in and was about to race up to her room to leap into her party dress when Holly appeared. ‘Come on!’ she yelled at Holly.

While Donna’s hysteria mounted as she snagged tights and spilt glitter powder on her dress instead of on her shoulders, Holly sat in a chair by the window and looked out onto the wet streets wondering why she’d come in the first place.

‘Let’s go.’ Donna was ready, still panting from her last-minute rush.

Holly got to her feet, both the corset and her new boots creaking ominously.

She shook back her hair and breathed as deeply as was possible with several hundred pounds’ worth of designer corset glued to her.

‘I’m ready,’ she said.

‘That’s a fabulous outfit,’ grumbled Donna as they went downstairs. ‘I hate this old dress. You look great and I look like I’ve been out milking the cows all day and only stopped ten minutes ago to get dressed.’

‘You don’t have cows,’ pointed out Holly, smiling at Donna’s mad logic. ‘And you look great.’

‘You know what I mean. You have that city gloss about you and I look like a bumpkin.’

‘No you don’t. And I borrowed this,’ Holly confided, breaking her promise to Bunny. ‘I was so scared that I’d look awful and the rest of them would think I’d never changed from being boring, fat old Holly Miller.’

‘But you look beautiful,’ said Donna in astonishment. ‘You’ve looked great for years. Haven’t you got a fabulous life and everything? What have you to feel scared about?’

‘Are you on drugs?’ demanded Holly, mystified as to how her friend had this inaccurate view of her life. ‘I don’t have a fabulous life, I work in a shop, I live in a flat I can’t afford, if I didn’t do overtime, I’d never be able to pay the electricity bill and my last date was a disaster.’

‘How am I supposed to know these things if you don’t tell me?’ said Donna crossly.

‘I’m sick telling you but you’re convinced I’m lying. You seem to think that living away from Kinvarra is like magic dust that transforms your life. It doesn’t.’

Donna stopped walking. ‘Right, so. We won’t mention this, though. I told the girls that you were getting on brilliantly and had men coming out your ears.’

Holly goggled at this. ‘You did what?’

‘I thought you were having a great time. Ah forget it, we’ll say nothing. Caroline and Lilli are great fun, you know,’ she added.

‘I don’t know.’ Holly was ready to confide all her fears now that she’d started. ‘I never talked to them at school, they looked down on us for being quiet.’

‘We were our own worst enemies at school, Holly,’ said Donna firmly. ‘We should have joined in more. That’s why I’m pals with Caroline and Lilli now. I don’t want Emily to grow up being all quiet and mousy like us. She plays with Caroline and Lilli’s girls and when they’re older, they’ll look after her. Nobody will call my daughter Speccy.’

So Donna had remembered. Holly stared at her friend. ‘And all this time I thought you were suffering from selective memory syndrome.’

Donna grinned. ‘No, I’ve just reinvented myself. Like Madonna. I’m making up for lost time. Come on.’

Caroline and Lilli were on their third double each. The bar was humming and they’d been mingling like mad, but there was still no sign of Michelle.

‘Stupid bitch,’ said Lilli crossly. ‘I always said she was unreliable. And where’s that Donna?’

‘She’s here,’ crowed Caroline. ‘And omigod who’s that with her?’

They watched in astonishment as Donna arrived, breathless as usual, accompanied by this tall, voluptuously stunning woman, wearing what looked suspiciously like the original version of Caroline’s corset. The woman’s dark hair fell gloriously around her shoulders, as glossy as if several catwalk hairdressers had been slaving over it for hours.

She hadn’t needed a seaweed wrap to squeeze her body into the corset; like a modern-day Sophia Loren, her figure was a natural hourglass, with a waspy waist that was surely narrower than one of Caroline’s thighs. Caroline, who’d put on a stone since her school days, wished she’d stopped her mid-morning Mars bar now.

The dark-haired woman was carrying an exquisite beaded handbag and her necklace was definitely the same one that Posh Spice had been wearing in Hello! Confidence oozed out of her like expensive moisturiser out of Estée Lauder radiance pearls.

‘It’s Holly Miller,’ said Lilli, awestruck.

Donna rushed up to her two new best friends, who clambered out of their corner to greet her and Holly. This was true reunion gold. Looking round the room, most people looked almost the same as at school, just with better highlights, real jewellery and more expensive clothes. Pat Wilson had had her long dark hair cut into a bob, Andrea Maguire’s red hair was now dyed a startling blonde, and even Babs Grafton had finally had her teeth fixed and sported contacts instead of heavy glasses. But Holly was totally different, like someone who’d just stepped out of one of those six-month make-over things on the telly.

‘Holly, I wouldn’t have recognised you!’ said Lilli, determined to get the upper hand now that she was faced with this much improved Holly.

‘Isn’t she fabulous looking,’ said Donna.

‘You look wonderful,’ agreed Caroline. ‘That’s a real designer corset, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Holly, overcome with the urge to tell them it was borrowed, ‘although it isn’t…’

Donna interrupted before Holly could say ‘mine’. ‘Wouldn’t we all like a staff discount at Lee’s.’ She gave Holly a prod in the arm and Holly took the hint.

‘…full price,’ Holly amended. ‘It wasn’t full price. We do get a discount.’ She hoped that Lilli and Caroline couldn’t tell there was a lie in the midst of all of this. Holly told lies with all the skill of a devout nun.

‘Tell us all about yourself,’ said Caroline eagerly. ‘I’d love to work in Lee’s; it must be amazing, all those famous people dropping in and out, trying on Versace evening dresses.’

‘I work in the children’s department,’ Holly said apologetically. ‘We stock Baby Dior but we’re drawing the line at sticking toddlers into sequinned evening dresses. It’s hard to get baby sick out of sequins.’

Everyone roared with laughter and Holly felt herself relax marginally. Normally, she was too nervous to joke round other people.

‘Still,’ Donna pointed out, ‘you get a discount. I must come up and look for an outfit for Emily’s First Communion. They have lovely dresses nowadays, not like the terrible frilly things we had to wear. Do you remember mine, Holly? It was awful and my mother put curlers in my hair the night before and it went frizzy and stuck out at angles like I’d been plugged into the mains!’

‘I bet mine was worse,’ said Lilli, shuddering. ‘My grandmother had my mother’s old dress put away and she made me wear it. It was all yellowing and too tight. I was a sight!’

And they were off, comparing stories about how awful they’d looked. Holly realised that it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. Lilli and Caroline seemed genuinely interested in her, and they weren’t the same arrogant schoolgirls she remembered. Lilli was still capable of being a bit sharp but Holly could cope with that now. And they seemed to think she was funny. Holly knew she’d been funny when she was at school too, it was just that nobody but Donna noticed.

As Michelle hadn’t turned up, Holly was certainly the most fashionable and interesting ex-Cardinal girl there that night and Caroline and Lilli attempted to stick with her. Holly would have preferred to talk to the other non-gang girls from school but she didn’t see any of them there. She’d met Andrea who used to sit beside her in art class, and Geena Monroe had thrown her arms round Holly and hugged her happily. Caroline’s once-great friend, Selina, who’d never even spoken to Holly in school, had been fulsome in her praise of Holly’s outfit, necklace and general improvement. But she hadn’t seen lovely quiet Brona Reilly who’d sat on her other side in art class, or Munira Shirsat and her best friend, Jan Campbell.

‘I think I saw Brona earlier, but a few of the girls didn’t reply to the letter,’ Caroline said when Holly asked her about Brona, Jan and Munira. ‘You’d think they’d want to meet up with everyone again. After all we shared together.’

Holly wondered if the other girls had been so nervous of a reunion that they had deliberately not replied.

‘You’ve heard all about us,’ Lilli said, when they were waiting for dessert, ‘and we haven’t heard a thing about the man in your life.’

‘Or should that be men?’ giggled Caroline, who’d decided that Holly was simply being enigmatic by not talking about herself. That this glamorous woman could be shy never occurred to her, and anyone who looked so amazing must have some gorgeous bloke in the wings. ‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘Tell us.’

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ said Holly.

Donna kicked her under the table. ‘What about that guy you were telling me about earlier?’

All Holly could remember was Donna talking about reinventing herself.

‘I bet he’s a hunk,’ said Lilli enviously.

‘Look!’ sighed Andrea, as waiters converged to place plates of butterscotch mousse, double chocolate cake and Hawaiian Surprise in front of them.

Donna took advantage of the lapse in everyone’s concentration to whisper into Holly’s ear.

‘Make someone up!’

‘Why?’ Holly hissed back.

‘Because I’ve told them you’ve got this fabulous life and I don’t want you to let me down. We were boring at school, we’ve got to make up for it now!’

Three spoonfuls into their dessert, attention turned back to Holly. She wished more than anything she could have a cigarette, otherwise she was going to eat all her mousse, and lick the plate, and she couldn’t afford to burst out of her outfit.

Caroline, Lilli, Selina and Andrea were waiting eagerly. Donna was smiling, encouragingly. Holly thought of how bad she was at lying, and then thought of how flattering it was that Caroline and Lilli really imagined that she could have a sexy boyfriend.

‘Is it someone famous?’ demanded Lilli, suddenly suspicious.

‘No,’ stammered Holly.

Donna gave her another kick under the table and Holly winced. She’d be black and blue tomorrow.

‘Well…’ They all looked at her eagerly. In fact, their entire end of the table was looking at her eagerly. All conversation seemed to have ceased as everyone waited for news of the new, improved Holly Miller’s man.

‘Go on,’ urged Donna.

Holly gulped. For some deranged reason, the only man who came to mind was the current object of Kenny’s longing: a male model named Xavier. Hard-bodied, blond-haired and with the face of a pouting archangel, Xavier reeked of sex, although Holly had it on good authority (from a drooling Kenny) that the only sex Xavier was interested in was not the female of the species. Trust her to come up with a fantasy boyfriend who was gay. Kenny would wet himself laughing when he heard.

‘Tell us,’ demanded Caroline.

Holly proceeded to describe Xavier in each perfect detail, leaving out the vital facts that he was gay and not going out with her. Lying by omission, she knew. What had Kenny said? ‘His lower lip is like a big biteable, coral silk throw pillow. Yummy.’ Kenny’s imagination knew no bounds when he was in lust.

‘A throw pillow, imagine. He sounds amazing.’ Even Lilli was impressed.

Holly smiled hollowly and took a huge gulp of wine. She’d kill Donna later.

But as Caroline and Lilli began describing their other halves in glowing terms in order to prove that Holly wasn’t the only one who could nab a handsome man, Holly began to realise why she’d gone along with Donna and lied. Feminism was a wildly outdated concept to Caroline and Lilli. Having a man was a status symbol to beat all others. Without one, Holly was low caste.

‘Hi, Holly,’ said a voice.

It was Brona, one of the few girls in school who’d been shyer than she was. Whereas Caroline and Lilli had disdainfully seen Brona as dull and unstylish, Holly’s kind eyes saw an old friend whose eyes glittered with a spark of fun.

Holly leapt to her feet and hugged Brona warmly. ‘How are you!’ she said delightedly, ‘it’s so lovely to see you. You haven’t been here all night, have you? Where were you?’

‘At the back of the room, I didn’t like to interrupt,’ Brona said, sliding mischievous blue eyes in the direction of Caroline and Lilli.

Holly grinned and bore her off to a quiet corner to talk.

‘You look completely amazing, Holly,’ said Brona in genuine admiration. ‘Poor Lilli’s eyes are out on stalks with jealousy. How are you?’

After a thoroughly enjoyable half hour, Holly had learned that Brona was working as a locum in Donegal having qualified as a doctor three years before. In her spare time, she painted, went scuba diving and she had just bought a recently-restored fisherman’s cottage on the coast. She was utterly happy.

‘Dr Reilly,’ said Holly, impressed. ‘Let’s go back and tell the gangettes and they’ll be wildly impressed.’

Brona grinned. ‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘I’ve learned not to want to impress people for the wrong reasons. Whenever I find myself rushing to try and let people see how clever I am, I ask myself: Why would I want to impress them?’

Holly flushed. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she said, shame washing over her because that’s just what she’d wanted to do: to impress her old classmates. Why had she bothered lying? She was what she was. What was the point of pretending?

‘I used to be miserably intimidated by the Carolines and the Lillis when we were in school,’ Brona revealed. ‘But I’m not quiet any more. Med school knocks that out of you, and I don’t feel the need to bother talking to people who once looked down at me.’

‘No, you’re right, I agree totally,’ Holly said.

‘I was a bit nervous of coming here tonight, you see,’ Brona said, ‘and now I have, I’m pleased because it’s shown me how much I’ve changed and become a new, stronger person.’

When Brona left, Holly sat down beside Donna again, feeling like a fraud.

The conversation hadn’t moved on from the subject of men.

‘You’re so lucky, Holly,’ Caroline said dreamily. ‘I do love being married, but there are times when I wish I was young, free and single like you. I’ve never had the chance to go out with lots of men and have wild flings…’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Donna, who was quite drunk now. ‘It’d be incredible to not be Mummy for a while, and party with gorgeous guys. You can look when you’re married but that’s it.’

‘You can look, all right,’ giggled Caroline, pointing at the waiter, who was very young and good-looking. ‘Holly’s the only one of us who can chat him up.’

‘Do you know something,’ Lilli said thoughtfully, ‘he’s the image of that guy you used to go out with, Holly. That guy you took to our debs dance. What was his name?’

‘Richie!’ said Donna, delighted to have remembered the name through the fog of alcohol. ‘Whatever happened to him?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Holly, shuddering. ‘It was so long ago I can barely remember what he looked like.’ She could, actually, but she didn’t want to even think about Richie. He’d been her first boyfriend and the first one to dump her unceremoniously. His image was embedded in her brain as the prototype guy-not-to-trust. Since Richie, Holly’s luck with men hadn’t improved. She didn’t really trust any of them.

‘He was cute, that Richie,’ Lilli said.

‘But not as cute as your new guy sounds,’ gushed Caroline.

‘We’ve got to meet this new boyfriend of yours,’ Lilli added. ‘You’ll have to bring him to Kinvarra.’

Holly glued a smile to her face. ‘Yeah, sure,’ she said.

The children’s wear department in Lee’s was heaving with pre-Christmas shoppers the following morning, which did nothing for Holly’s mild hangover. She hadn’t got drunk: you couldn’t and keep track of all the lies about a fabulous boyfriend with lips that resembled soft furnishings. But as she hadn’t been able to smoke, she’d certainly drunk more than usual – two Bloody Marys followed by a couple of glasses of wine at dinner.

Getting up that morning had been hard and she’d had to hit the snooze button three times before she could haul herself out of bed. She’d only just remembered to grab the bag with the precious corset which she’d sworn she’d return to Gabriella that day.

On her way back down to the basement from her third trip to the loos, she stopped on the staff stairs and had a little rest to revitalise herself. It was ages to her coffee break and she could kill for a sit down and the sugar hit of a chocolate biscuit.

‘Miss Miller, good morning,’ said a voice behind her.

‘Oh, er, good morning Mr Lambert,’ Holly said, fumbling frantically in her sleeve for a tissue. She blew her nose loudly so it would look as if she was preparing herself for going onto the shop floor. Trust her to get caught dossing by the store manager. Mr Lambert held the door open and Holly, still bleary-eyed and tired, had to follow him into the children’s department. Trying to inject a spring into her step, she walked over to the squashy child-sized purple and orange chairs by the changing rooms where Bunny was trying to convince a ten-year-old boy that he wouldn’t face immediate ridicule from his soccer-mad pals if he wore something as boring as a non-football-logo-ed shirt for his baby sister’s christening.