Bad Friends

I stood on the pavement, filming them with my little video camera – Bel’s parents and her brothers all cheering with joy. The way Bel looked at Johnno now was enough to give you hope.

The Christmas decorations were already up, although it was only November. The lampposts fizzed with electric blue stars and Hannah pointed a tiny hand and sang ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little Mummy’, and everybody laughed until Hannah went beet-red with excitement and overbalanced doing the deep curtsies she’d learned in ballet. And for a moment, for one long moment, I felt happy, happier than I’d been in such a long time.

I was just calling to Bel to describe how she felt on this auspicious day, in her last few moments before she become a Mrs for all time, when her face dropped visibly. Frowning, I lowered the camera. She was looking at something over my shoulder, and then she wrinkled her brow and Johnno looked in the same direction, then stooped and whispered in her ear. And then I felt them both gazing at me, and an icy claw crept down my back and I turned round quickly –

And there he was. Just standing there, just like that, as if everything was fine. He had both hands shoved deep in the pockets of an extremely smart dark suit, a suit he’d never have worn when he was with me, and for a moment he looked guarded – but then he caught my startled eye and slowly smiled. I felt a pain, like someone had just got hold of my heart and was slowly pulling the bleeding flesh out through my chest, as I stared at him. And then, as if in slow motion, I saw him put one long hand out behind him, and I saw a leather-gloved hand slip into his, and he pulled the owner, the girl who wore it, forwards.

A great gust of wind blew down the road. The trees leaned right over under the weight and the blue stars wobbled and Bel’s mother’s fussy pillbox hat went flying off; there was a big kerfuffle while Nigel ran to fetch it. My hair blew across my face and stuck to my lipsticked mouth, stuck fast, but I didn’t bother to remove it. I didn’t even care. How could he come here, here of all places, and, worst of all, bring this girl too?

He was still smiling, his short brown hair sticking up on end and his yellow eyes glinting with something I couldn’t quite read. Malice?

‘Hello Alex,’ I said quietly.

‘Maggie.’ He was ever so polite, of course he was. Charm the birds out of the trees, my Alex could, when he wanted to. ‘I’d like you to meet Serena.’

Serena was very thin and falsely blonde (how utterly predictable), and her expensive heels very high, though Alex still dwarfed both of us. She looked at me, looked me up and down, and then she smiled too, a slow smile, a smug smile, which spread across her chiselled face. I pulled my old red coat round me but still shivered in the wind. Graciously, the girl offered me her hand. Her gloves were so soft they felt like butter.

I stared blankly at this new pair. If Alex didn’t stop grinning like that I’d punch him right on the already skewed bridge of his once-broken nose. I clenched my fists. And then they moved off, towards the happy couple, the four of them all kissing and shaking hands, and I was left just standing there, a satellite on the windy pavement of Kings Road. Alone, despite a thousand strangers rushing by.

And all through Bel’s wedding in that little room, the room in muted tones that smelled of Bel’s red roses, I couldn’t concentrate, and when it was my time to read my bit out from The Prophet, the bit about ‘Love one another but make not a bond oflove – Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of yoursouls’, Bel’s mum had to nudge me to get up. And I tried not to let the strain show in my voice, or let my hands shake, and I stood very straight and tall – although my foot really hurt now and my heart truly ached – not looking at the row where Alex and Serena sat; and I tried to read the lines about love with sincerity, as if I hadn’t very nearly drowned in the bloody sea The Prophet was on about. As if I thought love could be a good thing, and was not likely to finish you off for all time.

Alex did at least have the good grace not to crash the wedding breakfast. He knew he’d done enough. He and Serena disappeared into the swirl of Christmas shoppers, big hand in buttery one, waving. I could sense he was elated in his shambolic one-off elegance, while I felt utterly bereft. Somehow I got through lunch – ate a bit of the duck pate starter, picked at the salmon main, managed, somehow, to down lots of the very good wine. I thought of Bel and how sad she’d been, on her own with Hannah, and how she’d turned her life around. A little drunk after all the speeches, I hugged her tighter than I’d ever done before.

‘I’m so happy for you, darling,’ I said, and her pointy little face was so soft with joy that I almost wept.

‘I’m so happy too,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t believe it really. I keep pinching myself.’

‘It does happen, you know, Bel. Good people do get what they deserve, sometimes.’

She squeezed my arm. ‘Yeah, well, your turn will come, I’m sure. I’m sure of it, my Maggie.’ She looked up at me, serious now. ‘I’m so sorry about Alex. He wasn’t invited, you know. I wouldn’t let Johnno, though he did want to.’

‘It’s okay, Bel. It’s hardly your fault that he turned up.’

‘Yeah, well, I wish he’d bloody stayed away. He knew it’d hurt you. God, after everything he –’

‘Don’t mention it, please,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s fine. I’ve got to get on with it sometime, haven’t I?’

She squeezed my arm again. ‘Oh God, Mag, I’m going to miss you.’

‘Oh Bel, don’t start that now. Let’s think of nice things.’ My sniff was barely audible. ‘You’re not going quite yet.’

‘And it’s not forever.’

‘It’d better bloody not be.’

‘And you’d better be at the party, okay?’

Hannah skipped up, her fairy wings iridescent in the candlelight. ‘Why are you crying, sillies?’ She observed me steadily. ‘You look like a panda, Auntie Maggie. Like what I saw in the zoo when Johnno took me. The fat one that was scratching her bottom.’ She slipped her hand in mine. ‘Don’t cry.’

‘I’m not. I’m laughing. I never cry.’

‘Why’s water coming out of your eyes then?’

‘Oh, Hannah.’ I picked her up and gave her a squeeze. She smelled of biscuits and fresh laundry. ‘You don’t half ask a lot of questions for someone so small.’

Then I went home to my father’s house, alone. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door, but by the time I reached it they’d rung off. And as my dad had gone to collect his girlfriend Jenny from the airport, I opened a bottle from his trusty Wine Club collection and drank myself to sleep.

Chapter Seven (#u1b5226d4-3425-5d33-ae63-8df7ffd09c40)

BEFORE: JUNE

I had dreamed that I was dying, such a very vivid dream. When I woke, I wasn’t absolutely sure I hadn’t. A huge weight squatted on my stomach, face pulled back in a rictus grin, gurning down at me until, panicking, I pushed up through its mass. Rearing from the bed, my arms flailed like a sprinter’s tangled in the finish line; a great sob of terror scraping through my chest.

I wasn’t dead, apparently. Not unless heaven was an ice-cream-coloured curtain drawn round a narrow bed, or a glimpse of rain through a small window in a quietly rumbling room. A room that was grey and regular. A dormitory. A ward. Not unless the woman in blue with smiley eyes who stepped neatly to my side was some bizarre kind of angel in a nurse’s uniform.

‘You haven’t got a halo.’ I blinked at the nurse. ‘Have you?’

The woman leaned forward to hear me properly, but my voice was apparently stuck in my sore and tired throat. I tried to smile instead, but smiling seemed to hurt me even more. Tentatively I brought my hand up to touch my own face, my hand that felt freezing.

‘Your lip’s been stitched.’

She caught my hand and moved it gently down. The nurse’s skin was beautiful, dark and creamy like a pint of newly pulled Guinness. I had the impulse to stroke her arm, but before I could she tucked my hand beneath the sheet. And I winced at the touch. My body ached; I was realising slowly that every part of me was tender, every part felt bruised and sore.

‘Only a few stitches, though.’

I thought the nurse might have said something next about being right as rain in no time, right as the rain I could see falling in vertical lines through that little window. Rain was never really right, though, was it, not unless you gardened like my father and – I had a revelation.

‘Have I gone mad?’ I enquired politely. ‘Is this the loony bin?’ This time the nurse caught my words.

‘Not mad, no, Maggie. You’ve had an accident. You’re in hospital.’

‘Accident?’

‘Just slip your sleeve up so I can take your blood pressure. Can you tell me how you feel now?’ she asked me kindly, but actually I couldn’t, because I didn’t know. I gazed at her blankly. Well, I did know I felt calm. Calm, but sort of bewildered.

‘You’re in shock, dear. And the doctor’s given you something to monitor the pain.’ The nurse tightened the band round my arm until it pinched. ‘Morphine.’

‘Ouch. I can’t seem to –’ I gazed at the nurse again. ‘I can’t think what happened. It’s funny, though. Was there –’ I stopped again.

‘What?’ the nurse prompted. ‘What do you think, Maggie?’

‘I keep thinking about a horse. Did I – did I fall off a horse?’ But I didn’t remember being on a horse yesterday. I could vaguely remember a riding lesson from years ago, somewhere in the countryside; remembered my mother waving gaily from the gate of the school. It must have been a long time ago. I remembered that my hat had been too big, that it used to rattle down over my eyes as I bobbed along until I was pink and out of breath and couldn’t see anything – not my mother, not the waving – only my own small hands beneath me, clutching the pony’s mane as valiantly I tried to retain control.

‘There was – I think there might have been a horse.’ The nurse seemed alarmed suddenly. She paused for a moment, thinking. ‘You were on –’

The consultant arrived at the foot of the bed with a flick of his pristine white coat. He was very tall and he had a face rather like an eagle, I thought. Yes, an eagle. His nose was a downward curve, like a cruel beak. He glanced at the chart at the foot of my bed, then at me.

‘Ms Warren.’