River Deep Read Free

darkly with grey, which made a stark contrast against her pale skin.
    ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry …’ Maggie began. As she talked, she felt her breathing slowly begin to even out and the edges of the room creep back into focus. ‘It’s just everything, you know? It’s this bloody time-capsule room where everything, including my life, stands still, it’s Mum and Dad always looking at me and Mum trying to talk to me, and I know she means well but if she thinks bloody ylang-ylang and positive affirmations are going to help …’ Maggie felt her voice rise hysterically and she took a deep breath. ‘It’s not having anything to do, not really. I mean, Mum said I could work in the bar, but Jesus, I did that for pin money when I was a student.’
    ‘You’ll find another job in no time, with your experience,’ Sarah tried to console her.
    ‘I know, I know I could find a job, but then if I did it’d be in catering and I know everyone in catering, and they’ll all know what’s happened, and anyway, even if that didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It wouldn’t be the same as running my own business. Building something up from scratch. With someone I love.’
    Maggie uncurled herself and leaned her back against the wall. ‘Fuck,’ she said simply. ‘I’m fucked, and that’s all there is to it.’
    Sarah leaned back next to her.
    ‘I know, shall we smoke a fag out of the window?’ she said, nudging Maggie gently in the ribs, dying for a breath of smoke-polluted fresh air. ‘I mean, I know we’re thirty-two and can smoke where we like, but as it’s permanently 1987 in here, out of the window would be more, you know, nostalgic.’ She proffered Maggie the packet, more for a joke than anything else, and then covered her surprise as her non-smoking friend took a cigarette, lit it, hauled herself off the bed and opened the window.
    ‘You know,’ Maggie said over her shoulder as she leaned out, ‘it wasn’t because I was worried about Mum and Dad catching us that I made us smoke out of the window – they’d have been “cool” with it. It was because I thought they were so embarrassing with all their bloody “permissive” parenting. I wanted them to be more like your mum, you know, the kind of parents that forced you to hide your disco clothes in a Tesco bag until you got half a mile down the road. Not the sort that had sex in the middle of a muddy field with a few thousand other people. When I was a kid I used to pray to be sent to a boarding school, like Trebizon or Mallory Towers or something. I couldn’t stand it here, couldn’t wait to get out of here and make my own life, get married, have my own kids. Force them to brush their teeth and do their homework instead of saying, “life is full of choices, Maggie, and they are all yours to make.” ’
    She stubbed the half-smoked cigarette out in an empty coffee cup – something which, in a woman who was almost compulsively tidy and neat, Sarah considered to be borderline psychosis – and continued. ‘Which is bloody bollocks, anyhow, because I didn’t
choose
to be back here in my parents’ pub, with my as-good-as-useless brother still living off them, still wandering about like an aimless halfwit. I didn’t
choose
for Christian to leave me. I didn’t
choose
any of this, but I’ve got it and I just can’t see where I go from here, Sarah. I just can’t see what to do.’
    ‘Listen.’ Sarah crossed the small room and stood in the square pool of sunlit warmth. ‘I know that right now things seem as if they’ll never get better – believe me, I’ve been there more times than I care to mention – but things will get better. It’s only been a couple of weeks. You haven’t had a chance to sort things out yet, you haven’t let it all sink in. And what you were saying about my mum … Have you forgotten she threw me out at eighteen because she wouldn’t have a pregnant girl bringing shame on the house? I never see her, I