I don’t have an answer for that, so I tune back into Becca on the other side of the table. ‘Please come with me, Mags?’ she says softly. ‘I really want to go.’ She shakes her head. ‘Stupid, really. I feel it’s something I need to do to put some of these ghosts behind me.’
I feel my resolve gently slipping. ‘Can’t New Guy go with you?’
She shakes her head, but doesn’t elaborate. ‘I really don’t want to walk into the room all by myself. It’s just … I’m not the same since Grant. He knocked my confidence.’
I know that. I’d watched, stood by helpless, as I’d seen him rob her of it bit by bit, unable to do anything but be a listening ear until she was ready to leave him and move on. I thought she’d done just that. I thought she’d bounced back.
I suck air in through my nostrils then puff it back out again. ‘OK. I’ll go.’
Becca lets out a huge sigh of relief and that’s when I realise this is what the constant badgering for me to go has been about all along. I feel awful I didn’t realise that before.
‘That’s it, then,’ she says, draining her glass. ‘It’s decided.’
When we’ve polished the rest of the bottle off, we book a cab to take me home and then drop Becca at the station and I give her an extra big hug.
‘Love you,’ she says and hugs me before I scramble out the car.
‘Love you too,’ I reply huskily, and then I close the door and watch the mini-cab drive away.
When I get back inside the hall light is still off. I dump my handbag on top of the shoe tidy and trudge upstairs, then I get into my pyjamas, slide between the cold sheets and try not to wonder why my husband isn’t home yet.
Dan and I don’t talk about it when we get up the next morning. I remember waking at 11.30pm and the bed was still empty, then again at 2am and he was there.
We waltz around each other in a practised dance as we have our breakfast – me passing him a knife from the drawer before he asks, him handing me the milk out the fridge so I can splash some in my tea. It’s odd that we know each other’s movements so well we can do this without thinking, while another part of me is wondering if I’ve ever known him at all.
We don’t talk about it in the evening either. Instead, we watch The One Show. When it’s finished Dan turns over to BBC Two. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t ask if I mind, so I have to sit in silence and try to be interested in cacti for the next hour. By the time the credits roll, I never want to see another of the spiky little suckers in the whole of my life. ‘That’s an hour I’ll never get back,’ I mutter.
Dan clicks the TV off and turns his head to look at me. ‘If you didn’t want to watch it, you could have said.’
‘You could have asked. Once upon a time, you would have. Not just assumed. Not just taken it for granted.’
He frowns. ‘Bloody hell, Maggie. I told you I would have turned over.’
I shake my head. He just doesn’t get it. ‘You never think about what makes me happy any more.’
Dan lets out an incredulous laugh. ‘How did we get from a stupid TV programme to this?’
I exhale and look away. Oh, for a man you didn’t have to explain everything to with brightly coloured flash cards! We’ve been together for close to twenty-five years. He should know me by now. Suddenly, I’m very angry that he doesn’t.
That was the unspoken promise on our wedding day, I’d thought. That we’d grow old together, mesh our souls so tightly that we’d finish each other’s sentences, share that weird kind of telepathy I’d seen between my grandparents before they’d died. But Dan has never once completed a sentence of mine, and I seem to have to explain myself to him more than ever nowadays.
You were supposed to at least try, I wail inside my head. That was the deal.
I will him to understand me, but after looking at me for a few seconds, he huffs, picks up his half-empty mug and leaves the room. I slump down on my end of the sofa and cross my arms. Part of me hasn’t got the energy to knock this into his thick skull; the other half wants to follow him and pick a fight.
I collect my mug, swill down the last of my cold decaf and head for the kitchen, where I let him know, at volume, just where he can put his effing muddy shoes.
1992
I stare at my face in the bathroom mirror. The young me. The wrong me.
‘Maggie!’ Becca calls again. ‘Are you there?’
I hear her walking into the kitchen, looking for me, probably. If I remember rightly, she has some juicy gossip to deliver about her night with Stevo Watts and she won’t want to wait. I screw my face up and close my eyes. No. That’s wrong. How can this be? How can I be here, now, and still … remembering. It’s not possible.
I turn the tap on and splash the cold water on my face, hoping it’ll wake me up, but all it does is cause freezing droplets to run down my neck. I shiver.
What do I do? This can’t be real. Can it?
‘Margaret Alison Greene!’ Becca yells, doing a passable imitation of my mother when she’s in a snit. It’s not quite perfect, though, because I can hear a smile in her voice. My bedroom door squeaks as she continues her sweep of the flat. I realise I can’t stay here in the bathroom, hiding. Eventually she’s going to find me.
‘Maggie?’ she calls and this time the smile is gone. Her footsteps get faster.
Don’t think about it, I tell myself. There’ll be time for answers later.
I nod at my reflection and notice that the young girl looks tense and serious, much more like the woman I’m used to seeing in the mirror, then I dry my face, take a deep breath and walk out into the hallway. I find Becca in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea.
‘There you are!’ she says, grinning at me. ‘I was starting to think you’d been abducted by aliens!’
I just nod. I can’t seem to find my voice.
It was weird enough seeing Young Me in the mirror, but seeing Young Becca is even more surreal. I’m caught in the grip of déjà vu so strong that it makes my stomach roll.
‘God, are you alright? You look like you’re about to faint. Bad night, huh?’ She puts a hand on my shoulder then gives me a cheeky look. ‘Or should I say a really good one?’
‘Something like that …’ I manage to croak.
‘Well, whatever your night of debauchery was like, I doubt it could be as bad as mine!’
Wanna bet? I think.
She turns to grab two mugs off the wooden tree near the kettle. ‘I’ll tell you all about it, but after I’ve done this. I’m gasping for a cuppa!’
I watch her in silence as she begins to make the tea. Her hair is still a mousy colour with a hint of honey that I remember, the colour it was before she discovered highlights and started covering up the premature grey. That’s not the only difference to the Becca I know in my real life. I’d thought present-day Becca glowed? Not compared to this. There’s a sense of energy and bounce to this Becca – resilience – that’s been eroded from my best friend of twenty-plus years. All the scars, all the knocks in her confidence from her crappy marriage and her horrible divorce, are gone and they’re all the more glaring for their absence.
A rush of love for her hits me, for the friend she once was and for the survivor she will become. I launch myself at her