gentle grey eyes glistening with sympathy.
‘Am I fuck?’ Carrie laid her head on the table and bashed it a couple of times. It hurt.
‘Carrie!’
She lifted her head and said with a weary sigh, ‘I’m not fine at all. I feel pants.’
Seeing Richard had knocked her sideways, out through a glass window seventy-five stories up, and she was still hurtling through the air.
Her response was ten times worse than she could have imagined. Out of sight, out of mind had worked pretty well for her to date. Whoever talked about opening cans of worms had known their onions. She wished she’d walked out of the cinema as soon as she’d heard the name Richard Maddox.
‘Probably the shock of seeing him again, as it were.’ Angela lifted her shoulders in a helpless shrug, her brave attempt at reassurance at odds with her bewildered expression.
She and Carrie were so different. Angela’s mild disposition and gentle approach meant that she sailed rather serenely through life on a gentle swell, never plunging into the lows or cresting the highs, despite the constant pain and difficulties she suffered with her rheumatoid arthritis.
Her affair with a married man that resulted in Jade was the most out-of-character thing that Angela had ever done and even now Carrie had difficulty in believing that her sister had been swept away enough to commit adultery. ‘Maybe it’s because you never had proper closure. When I got pregnant with Jade, I knew that it would be over with Clive. With you and Richard, it never ended properly. Just drifted to a halt.
‘I’m sure that’s what it is. How long ago was it since you last saw him? Seven, eight years? You can’t possibly be in love with him, not after all this time.’
Carrie swallowed a protest. What if she could? She’d never tested the theory before today. ‘Yes, you’re right. It’s the shock of seeing him in all his twelve-foot celluloid handsome glory.’ That’s what had made her heart beat a thousand times faster and deepened the hollow feeling in her stomach all the way to Australia.
‘No one’s that good looking. Do you think he was wearing loads of make-up?’ Angela said knowledgeably, as if she spent hours on a film set.
‘Probably,’ agreed Carrie, nodding as if her life depended on it.
‘And I bet he had a body double.’ Angela leaned back in her chair, waving her cup about in her usual feeble grip, sloshing tea over the sides. ‘His body can’t be that good.’
Carrie nodded again. If she wasn’t careful someone would stuff her in the back window of a car.
Angela had a point, though. It certainly hadn’t been when he was in his twenties but then he wasn’t leading a superstar lifestyle then. You don’t exactly fill out a scrawny frame when you’re existing on baked beans and fish-finger sandwiches, living in an unheated, mould-ridden flat off Cold Harbour Lane in Brixton, shivering off any muscle tone to keep warm.
‘Alternatively,’ Angela was her in stride now. ‘he could have a Rottweiler of a personal trainer who dogs his every step-making sure he lives on horrible Hollywood-healthy milkshake things, like wheatgrass and alfalfa sproutings or that keen squaw stuff.’
Carrie smiled as Angela pulled a bleurgh face.
‘And he must wear contacts. No one’s eyes are that blue.’
Richard’s were. To hide the ping of protest her heart made, Carrie let out a mirthless laugh, cupping the mug of tea to take a sip.
‘Sweet of Alan to come with us.’ Angela’s eyes were guileless and her smile kind.
‘Subtle.’
Angela shrugged. ‘He’s lovely. You’ve been seeing each other for a while.’
Carrie didn’t say anything.
‘Do you think something might happen there one day?’
‘One day. I guess.’ Carrie had been giving it more thought recently. He made her happy. So happy. They were good together. She loved him. Not in the crazy, helter-skelter being-at-a-fairground way she’d loved Richard but in a stronger, more enduring fashion.
‘What if one day is soon?’
Carrie was missing something. Angela’s eyes were bird- bright, beady with expectation.
‘What do you know?’
‘Oh.’ Worry crept across her face. ‘Shoot, I’ve given the game away.’
‘Well you hadn’t but you have now.’
‘If he did ask you, you know, to marry him, you’d say yes, wouldn’t you?’ The lines in her forehead deepened as she realised she’d dug herself into an even deeper hole.
‘Angela. What do you know?’
‘You mustn’t tell him I told you.’
‘Like I’m going to do that.’
‘He asked to borrow one of your rings, to get the size right.’ She sighed. ‘And he showed me lots of pictures, to check he’d get something you’d like.’ She brightened. ‘But he didn’t say when. Although, now I’ve spoilt the surprise. You’re going to have to act surprised when he asks you.’
‘You muppet. How could he not know you are the worst person at keeping secrets?’
‘I kept one.’
Carrie sighed. ‘You did.’
‘If he asks, what are you going to do, about, you know? You’ll have to do something.’
‘Yeah, I will and I should have done it years ago, instead …’ she paused. Instead of deliberately ducking the issue. ‘I need to do something about Richard Maddox.’ See, if she said his surname, it made it less personal, as if he wasn’t her Richard. As if she wasn’t entitled to call herself Carrie Maddox. ‘It’s time we got a divorce.’
Carrie dragged herself up the stairs to the staff room, consigning whoever had timetabled double drama for Year 7’s last periods on a Friday to the very far reaches of hell. As usual the staff room looked as if a cyclone had torn through, followed by marauding Vikings, hotly pursued by random burglars. The cupboard was bare of a single clean coffee cup and the biscuit barrel offered nothing more than crumbs.
Glad it was the end of the day, Carrie retrieved her bag and phone from her locker and a yellow post-it note fell out. With a smile she scooped it up from the floor. Alan had a habit of slipping them through the crack in the door.
Dinner tomorrow night? Prezzo or Pizza Express. Both have offers on. Lots of love Ax
He was out at a quiz night this evening with his cycling buddies and she’d promised herself a curry, a glass of wine and an hour with her laptop. Since she’d won a playwriting
