Past Secrets

Gone to phone his nubile student, perhaps? To say that Maggie would get over it and then it would be business as usual.

We’ll have to use your place instead of mine.

Grey mightn’t like it so much if he had to bonk his lover in some grotty student digs, though. He liked the smooth crispness of clean sheets, a power shower and wooden floors where you could comfortably walk barefoot without wondering how many other zillions of people had walked barefoot on it before, shedding flakes of dry skin. He’d been brought up in luxury. Before she’d met Grey, Maggie had known nothing of the world of Egyptian cotton sheets with a 400-thread count. To her, sheets came in only two varieties: fitted and flat.

Maggie stuck her ear up against the door and listened. Nothing. She unlocked the door, came out and looked around the apartment, thinking that it no longer looked like the home of her dreams, only an identikit apartment trying hard to be elegant and different, but still looking exactly like its neighbours.

Everything she had achieved had been done on a budget, from the bargain basement African-inspired coffee table to the Moroccan silk cushion covers she’d bought on a street stall and which were now woolly with loose threads. Despite the kudos of being an ultra-clever doctor of studies whose lectures were always packed, Grey wasn’t paid well.

The library paid less. But Maggie was used to not having money. She’d grown up that way. Making do, managing: they were the words she’d lived with as a child. There had been great happiness in her home, for all the lack of hard cash and the shiny new things some of the other girls had. Money wasn’t important to her. Love, security, safety, happiness were. She’d tried so hard to make their home beautiful, the heart of their love. What a waste of time that had been.

Sinking down on the low couch, still numb, she wondered what she should do next. Storm off? Or wait for Grey so she could rage at him that since he’d cheated, he should be the one to go.

Maggie’s Guide to Life didn’t cover this one.

He’d tell her not to be stupid. She could almost hear him saying it, in measured tones that made any argument he laid out sound entirely plausible.

Honestly, Maggie, listen to yourself. There’s absolutely no point in being hasty. Think about this, don’t give in to some primitive emotional response. It was just sex.

Just sex. One of Grey’s endlessly philosophising colleagues had probably written a paper on the subject: how just sex was occasionally justifiable. If the partner in question was away; if the potential bonkee was particularly gorgeous; if nobody would ever know.

Even with her eyes open, Maggie could still see Grey and the blonde on her bed, imagine it all: the blonde’s moans of pleasure as she rose to orgasm; Grey saying: ‘Oh baby, oh baby, that’s so good.’ The words he murmured to Maggie, her words. But they’d never be truly hers again.

Although there was nothing left inside her stomach, Maggie felt she might be sick again. No, she wouldn’t wait for him to explain it to her. Grabbing her handbag from where she’d dropped it so happily what felt like a lifetime ago, she ran out of the apartment. If she was somewhere else, a place where every single ornament didn’t remind her of Grey, she might be able to work out what she’d do next. A bus was coming down the road, the bus to Salthill where she could walk on the beach. Without hesitation she ran to the stop and got on.

CHAPTER FIVE

On Summer Street, the sun had shifted in the afternoon sky. Christie Devlin’s back garden was bathed in a golden glow that lit up the velvety roses and turned the cream-coloured trellises a glittering white. It was the sort of afternoon Christie loved.

James had phoned to say he’d caught an earlier train and should be home by seven instead of nine. The postman had arrived with a late-afternoon bounty of the gadget catalogues Christie loved to devour at night, picking out useful things she’d buy if she could afford them. The dogs, too tired of the heat to clamour for another walk, were content to lie in the shade of the kitchen door, dreaming happily, two sets of paws twitching.

Sitting on her tiny terrace with a cup of iced tea, Christie was supposed to be marking art history essays for tomorrow morning, but she couldn’t concentrate.

The heat, the glory of her garden, James coming home early, none of it mattered. Nothing except the fear that sat hard and stone-like in the pit of her stomach, telling her there was something very wrong.

In her kitchen seven houses away, Una Maguire was standing on a chair looking for a spare tin of baking powder in the larder cupboard beside the fridge. She’d decided to bake a Victoria sponge for the church fair and there had been only a scraping of powder in the old tin.

‘Dennis, have you been at my cupboards again?’ she yelled good-humouredly at her husband. It was a joke. As their daughter, Maggie, was well aware, Dennis Maguire barely knew how to open the cupboards in the kitchen and his only domestic duty was washing and drying. He never put away the dishes he’d dried. Una did that.

For years, it had been Maggie’s job in the production line of washing and drying, but she was long gone with her own life, and the duty fell to Una again.

‘Never touched them,’ Dennis yelled back from the living room where he was putting the final touches to the model of a Spitfire that had taken two weeks to complete. The construction was entirely accurate: Dennis had checked in his Jane’s Aircraft Guide.

‘Don’t believe you,’ teased back Una, over-reaching past a pack of semolina because she was sure she’d seen the red metallic glint of the baking powder tin. With a swiftness that surprised her, the chair tilted, she lost her footing and fell to the floor, her left leg crumpling underneath her.

The pain was as shocking as it was instantaneous. Cruelly sharp, like a blade neatly inserted.

‘Dennis,’ whimpered Una, knowing that she’d done something serious. ‘Dennis, come quickly.’

In the comfort of her bedroom at number 18 Summer Street, Amber Reid lay in her boyfriend’s arms and heard the sound of the ambulance droning up the street to the Maguires’ house. Amber had no interest in looking out the window to see what had happened. The world didn’t exist outside the tangled sheets of her bed, still warm from their lovemaking.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked Karl.

She couldn’t help herself, even though every magazine she’d ever read said that this sort of question was a Bad Idea. She didn’t think she was a needy person, but there was something about this intimate moment after lovemaking, that made her want to know. She’d been a physical part of Karl. She wanted to be inside his head too, inside for ever, always a part of him.

‘Nothing. Except how beautiful you are.’

Karl shifted, laying his leg over hers, trapping her.

As fresh heat swelled in her belly, Amber realised that there was nothing more erotic than the feeling of naked skin against naked skin. Just lying there after the most incredible lovemaking was almost beyond description.

She ran questing fingers along his powerful chest, feeling the curve of his muscles, the sensitive nubs of his nipples, so different from hers.

She’d seen men’s bodies before, but never fully naked except on a canvas or on a plinth carved from finest Carrara marble. And marble felt different from the warm, living beauty of a man’s body beside hers, inside hers. Desire rushed through her veins again. Why had nobody told her lovemaking could be like this? All those talks about pregnancy, AIDS and being emotionally ready, nobody had said how utterly addictive it all was.

‘We should get up,’ Karl said. ‘It’s after six. Your mother will be home soon.’

Half six, Amber had said. Her mother ran her life on a strict schedule. Half six home, change out of her office suit by 6.35, dinner on the table – pre-prepared from the night before, obviously – by seven.

Amber used to love the comfort of their evening routine. It made home seem like a refuge. No matter how much life changed in the outside world, her mother put dinner on the table at seven. But lately, Amber found herself telling Ella that when she moved out of home, she’d never have a schedule as rigid as her mother’s as long as she lived. Life was about being a free spirit, not a slave to the clock or the powers of good kitchen cleaning products, or having to hear the oft-repeated phrase ‘a good education and you can go anywhere, Amber’.

Right now, education suddenly seemed so boring. Her mother’s view of life was stifling and there was no escape from it. And Mum would hate Karl, who was a free spirit, would hate his intrusion into their tightly run lives. It wouldn’t be the two of them any more. It would be a different twosome, Amber decided firmly: her and Karl.

She slithered over until she was astride Karl, her long tawny mane a tangle over his lightly tanned shoulders. ‘We don’t have to get up,’ she said, smiling. ‘We’ve ages yet.’

There was so much they could do in that precious twenty minutes.

‘And if my mother arrives home early, you can always hop out the back window and climb down the flat roof of the kitchen.’

Her mother was still paying off the credit union loan for the kitchen extension, a fact that often brought a worried look to her face.

Money: that was another subject Amber never wanted to worry about again, along with timetables and exams. Karl was going to be a famous musician and they’d have loads of money. Enough to pay off her mother’s debts, enough to buy anything Amber wanted.

Just once, she’d love the thrill of shopping and never looking at the price tag. Wouldn’t it be glorious to spend without worrying or feeling guilty over it?

‘The neighbours will call the cops if they see a strange bloke hop out of your bedroom on to the kitchen roof and down the lane.’ Karl put both hands around her waist and splayed his fingers.

Amber was proud of her tiny waist. She’d inherited her mother’s hourglass figure, although, thank God, she hadn’t inherited her total lack of interest in looking good. Her mother wouldn’t have been seen dead in the clothes Amber wore: slivers of vintage fabric that barely covered her breasts, low-rise jeans that revealed more than a hint of bare skin. Mum just never bothered making herself look good or showing off her waist.

Amber arched her back as Karl’s fingers moved up to cradle her ribcage. She didn’t want him to go. They had plenty of time.

‘Everyone’s at work or cooking kids’ dinners,’ she said, feeling sympathy for anyone engaged in such boring duties. ‘Nobody will see you.’

There was only one person on the street who might possibly know she had phoned in sick to school and might wonder at her having a strange guy in the house, and that was Mrs Devlin.

Amber approved of Christie Devlin, even if she was old and, therefore, should be totally wrinkly, boring and incapable of remembering what it was like to feel alive. For all Christie’s silver hair, she had a way of looking at Amber that said she knew what was going on in the girl’s head. Scary. Amber wondered if Christie would know by looking at her that Amber had just had the most incredible sex of her life.

Losing-her-virginity sex. She’d nearly done it eighteen months ago, with cute but dopey Liam, who was a friend of Ella’s youngest brother. She’d called a halt to the proceedings just in time. Liam’s hand was burrowing into her jeans and she’d realised that she was about to have sex with a guy just to see what it was like rather than because she would die then and there if she didn’t.

A woman had the right to say no at any point, her mother had said in one of her talks about sex.

‘Whaddya mean, you don’t want to after all?’ demanded Liam, who clearly didn’t agree with Amber’s mother on the whole issue of coitus interruptus.

‘I mean no,’ said Amber. ‘No means no. Got it?’

And although Liam hadn’t spoken to her since – not a big worry – she was glad she’d said no when she did. Imagine having to live your whole life knowing you’d lost your virginity to an ordinary guy like Liam when you could have the memory of a man like Karl Evans?

This was sex with a man of the world, a twenty-five-year-old man with a future. He was her future. She was going to travel the world with him and discover life, with a big L. She’d be eighteen in less than three weeks. She could do what she wanted then. Nobody could stop her.

‘So you’ll come with us?’ he asked, returning to the subject they’d discussed earlier, before they’d fallen into bed. ‘If we’re going to work with a producer in New York, we’ll be gone at least six months. I’d hate to be away from you. I couldn’t bear that.’

‘I’d hate to be away from you too,’ Amber answered, stroking his skin with exploring fingers.

This was love. Pure contentment flowed through her veins. Karl was so crazy about her that he wanted her to travel with his band to America to record their album.

He needed her, he said. He’d been writing songs like a man possessed since they’d met. ‘You’re my muse,’ he’d said.

And Amber, who’d been told all her life how talented and special she was, believed him. She and Karl: they were the twosome now.

As the ambulance carted Una Maguire and her frantic husband Dennis off to hospital, Amber gazed at her lover with shining, besotted eyes and imagined all the wonderful times they’d have. Her mother would flip when she discovered Amber wasn’t going to art college after all, but Amber was an adult now, wasn’t she? She could do what she liked. That, surely, was the point of all those years of ‘you have the power to do what you want’ conversations. Amber would do what she wanted and although she hated hurting her mum, Faye would have to live with it.

Faye left work early so she could dash into the mini-market near home and pick up a few last-minute bits. They were out of basmati rice and she’d defrosted a home-cooked vegetarian korma the night before.

Ordinary rice wouldn’t work, it had to be basmati.

Near the checkout, she dallied briefly by the ranks of magazines and papers. She loved the interior decoration magazines but they were all so expensive, so she didn’t splash out very often. But she felt weary this evening, and the house felt lonely when Amber was upstairs at her desk bent over old exam papers. Faye could do with a treat. Finally choosing a magazine with a supplement on bedrooms, she looked down and her eye was caught by the lead story in the local free newspaper.

Developer’s Deal With Council: 25 Apartments in Summer St Park

She picked it up and moved to the checkout.

‘They must have got it wrong. They can’t be talking about the park here, opposite my house?’ she said to the cashier.

‘That’s the one,’ the woman said, scanning the groceries. ‘Shame to rip up that lovely little park. I don’t know how they get away with that type of thing. There won’t be a bit of green left around here if the developers get their way.’

‘But it’s tiny,’ Faye protested. ‘And surely nobody’s allowed to buy an actual park?’

A queue appeared behind her and Faye was in too much of a rush to stop to read the story, so she stuffed the paper into the top of her grocery bag and left. In her car, she read it all quickly with mounting horror.

The pavilion in the park was falling down and the council had decided to sell it, and the half-acre of land that accompanied it, to a developer in return for the developer building another park and a community centre on a sliver of waste ground a mile away.

‘We’re not tearing up the park,’ insisted a council spokesperson. ‘The park is staying. The pavilion was never part of the park. People just thought it was. We’ve every right to sell it because we can’t afford to renovate it and it’s dangerous, besides. Summer Street will still have its park.’

Except that it will be half the size and have a dirty big apartment block cutting out the sun, Faye thought furiously.

She drove home angrily. Amber would be just as annoyed to hear about this, she loved that little park. Honestly, why did things have to change all the time?

The evening walkers were out in force when Maggie left the beach at Salthill and got the bus back into the city. The bus was only half full and she sat a few seats behind a group of schoolgirls still in uniform.

Half listening to their chatter, she stared listlessly out the window. She’d come to no conclusions because she couldn’t think about Grey. Her mind refused to cooperate, racing off on ideas of its own. She had to work late the next evening instead of Shona. Were they out of coffee? Should she and Grey go to see the new Pixar film? Anything was better than thinking about what had just happened.

From the depths of her handbag, her mobile phone rang. On auto-pilot, Maggie retrieved it, saw that her father was calling and clicked answer.

‘Dad,’ she said, managing to sound bright. Her entire world hadn’t just crashed and burned, no. All was well. Faking happiness – wasn’t that what communicating with your parents was all about?

‘What’s up, Dad?’

‘Hello, love, it’s your mum.’

Maggie’s hand flew to her chest.

‘She’s in hospital, she’s broken her leg.’

A breath Maggie didn’t know she’d been holding was released. ‘I thought you were going to tell me something terrible,’ she whispered, cupping her forehead in one hand with relief.

‘It is terrible,’ he went on. ‘Your mother insisted they did a bone density scan in the middle of it all, and it seems she’s got osteoporosis. The doctor says he doesn’t know why she hasn’t broken bones before.’ Her father had to stop talking for a moment and gulped. ‘I don’t know what to do, Maggie. You know how your mum copes with everything and all, but she’s taking this badly. She keeps saying she’s fine but she’s been crying. Your mother crying.’

He sounded shocked. Una Maguire could see the silver lining in every cloud and had taught her daughter that a smile was easier to achieve than a frown. Mum never cried, except at films where a child was hurt or the dog died.

‘Maggie, I know it’s not fair but could you come home for a couple of days…?’

Maggie could imagine her father standing obediently outside the hospital entrance, not using his mobile phone inside as per the instructions on the hospital walls, even though nobody else obeyed them.

Dad, with his wide-open eyes, his few strands of hair and his endearing inability to deal with daily life to the extent that Maggie felt he ought to wear permanent L-plates. Dad, who’d never seen her mum cry over anything.

‘I’ll be home tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about a thing.’

It was, after all, the solution to everything.

You’re running away, said a voice in her head: a voice that sounded remarkably like Shona when she was in Dr Phil mode. Shona loved Dr Phil and felt that America’s favourite television doctor’s principles could be applied to every life situation.

Are you doing the right thing? Ask yourself that. Would you advise a friend in a similar situation to do what you’re doing? Will running away solve your problem? Dr Phil asked all the right questions and so did Shona.

No, no and no. Maggie knew the answers. But Dr Phil hadn’t the benefit of Maggie Maguire’s Guide to Life.

Don’t stuff your bra to make your A-cups look like B-cups. Boys won’t get close enough to notice but nasty girls from school will. Nobody wants to be No-Tit Maguire for a whole month, as Maggie knew from experience.

Guys who say things like ‘I’ve never met anyone like you’ are not lying, exactly, but probably don’t mean it the way you think they do.

Maggie had a new piece of advice to add to the Guide:

When in doubt, put your running shoes on. Nothing will improve but at least you don’t have to stare your defeat in the face on a daily basis. And if you can’t see it, surely it can’t be there?

In a trendy little internet café close to the apartment, she ordered a latte and a session on the web. Flicking through flights to Dublin, she found one that left the following afternoon, giving her time to pack as well as to negotiate with the library for emergency leave. When she’d booked it, she knew there was only one more big task left: to go home and say goodbye to Grey.

Goodbye Grey, I’m going and we’re selling up so you’ll have to take your jail bait somewhere else from now on.

No, too bitter.

Bye, Grey, I’m going home to Dublin for a while to think. You cheating son of a bitch.

Again, too bitter.

Maybe she ought to stick at Goodbye, Grey.

When she got back to the apartment, Grey and the remains of a Thai meal were both in the living-room area. Maggie didn’t feel even mildly hungry.

The words ‘You lying, cheating bastard’ ran round in her head like a washing machine on final spin.

‘Hello,’ she said. See, not bitter.

‘Honey.’ Grey leapt off the couch and went to touch her, but the frozen look in Maggie’s eyes stopped him. They stood several feet apart, staring at each other, misery on both their faces.

‘I am so sorry,’ Grey said, and he sounded it.

He honestly was sorry. But sorry that he’d had sex with a stunning blonde student or sorry he’d been caught? Bastard.

‘I love you. You might not believe that, but I do.’

‘Then why did you do it?’ Maggie asked. She hadn’t meant to ask anything, had meant to tell him bluntly she was going home for a while. But the question had shot out of her mouth before she could stop it.

Grey’s gaze didn’t falter, she had to give him that. ‘I don’t know,’ he said dismally. ‘She was there, I could have her…it sounds dumb, but I still love you, Maggie. You’re different, special.’

The spinning washing machine still kept rattling out ‘lying, cheating bastard’ as Maggie struggled to make sense of Grey’s words. Her heart was broken and this was his sticking plaster?

‘She was there? Is that your only excuse, Grey? She was bloody well there? If I’m so special, why would you even want to make love with someone else whether she was there or not? If I’m so special, then you wouldn’t want to look crossways at another woman, never mind screw one in our bed. IN OUR BED!’

He looked taken aback at this. Maggie was not a shouter.

‘It wasn’t making love, it was sex. It’s not what you and I have. That’s…’

‘Don’t tell me,’ she snapped, ‘special.’ Infidelity must have a previously undetected side effect of robbing people of their linguistic skills. Even Grey. She had never known Grey to run out of words before.

‘I’m not explaining it correctly,’ he began.

‘Oh yes, you are, and it still doesn’t make sense. You’re the one who says he’s logical, I’m supposed to be the klutzy one who forgets her bank card numbers and can’t program her mobile phone.’ Maggie knew her voice was rising but she couldn’t help it. If Grey was tongue-tied, her word power was on 110 per cent. ‘So how can you come up with such an illogical explanation? If I’m so different and special, you shouldn’t want sex or love with anyone other than me. Simple. QED. That’s what I thought I was getting when we moved in together: fidelity, monogamy, no threesomes. Did I miss the briefing where you said we’d sleep with other people? Or were you just lying through your teeth when you said that I was the sort of woman you wanted, not a pneumatic blonde like all your previous girlfriends?’

‘I wasn’t lying and I do believe in fidelity, really,’ Grey said helplessly. He sat on the edge of the armchair, running a hand through his hair. He had such long, sensitive fingers, like a pianist, fingers that could elicit a ready response from Maggie. He still looked handsome and desirable, with sexily rumpled hair as if he’d been so lost in his books he had forgotten to comb it. Maggie, who spent all her time surrounded by books, had always found this combination of brains and beauty utterly captivating. She could totally understand Ms Peachy Skin wanting to sleep with him. Grey was gorgeous, clever, and powerful within his sphere, all wrapped up in one package.