rafters with duvets, dirty clothes and crumb-shedding toasters as they headed off home for Christmas. It was a different Oxford once they’d gone – quieter, less congested, but a lot less lively as well. They’d avoided the snow, which had snuck in like a thief in the night, laying an inch thick on all but the busiest roads.
She’d arrived safely, if a little soggy, at Kavanagh’s Books of Note. She’d gleefully accepted the brown-paper wrapped package that had cost so much, and stashed it in her backpack before getting back in the saddle and heading towards the Covered Market, where she planned to treat herself to some hot chocolate and a small shed-load of tiffin. It was Christmas, after all. Almost.
Along the Broad she went, past the colleges of Balliol and Trinity, before veering off onto the ancient cobbles of Radcliffe Square. As she jiggled along, threading her way around the scarf-wearing academics heading to the majestic Bodleian Library, she noticed the lights were still on – it was after nine, but the hallowed halls of learning were still glittering with electricity, throwing tiny neon clouds through the glass. Must be all that dark wood panelling, cocooning them from the dazzling sunshine of the day. The steps up to it were dusted with snow, the cobbles coated and damp.
She was heading down the side of St Mary the Virgin, with its towering spire and dizzying staircase, looking all the more like a postcard through the fuzzy haze of still falling snowflakes. Inside, she could hear the sound of angelic voices rehearsing their Christmas carols – a crowd of undoubtedly less-than-angelic little boys transforming the Holly and the Ivy into something splendid and magical.
Then it was on, towards the High Street, accompanied by the random thought that Ellen might not like the book at all. That maybe she should have jacked in the idea completely, and given her the equivalent in cash. Maybe she’d prefer beer tokens to a first edition. Maybe she was just holding on to an image of her little girl that was long gone, eaten alive by the coltish young woman she now shared a home with. When Ellen bothered to come home at all, that was.
Later, she admitted to herself that possibly – just possibly – she’d been a little bit distracted. The much-used passage down to the High was relatively clear of snow, and she’d stepped up her speed just a tiny bit. Teeny tiny – so much so that her legs had hardly noticed the difference.
Sadly, that teeny tiny acceleration meant that when she saw the other bike – heading straight towards her and at what seemed like an impossible speed for a non-motorised vehicle to achieve – it was too late to do anything but screech like a banshee and hope for the best. Which was kind of her motto for life – she should probably get it printed up onto a T-shirt.
Catching a glimpse of startled, deep hazel eyes and a look of horror as he realised what was about to happen, they both attempted to swerve. Too late.
The next thing Maggie knew she was flying through the air, her bike free-wheeling into the wrought iron railings, the spokes crumpling and crunching as they slammed into them. She clenched her eyes shut as the world turned upside down, and braced herself for a crash landing. It came, with a dull thud, her backside skidding along in a pool of frost and slush and her helmet bouncing off the floor in a way that made her go temporarily cross-eyed.
For a moment she was too stunned to move. She lay there, feeling the moisture creep through the many layers of her clothing, a slow, paralysing sog of freezing cold snow wrapping itself around all her limbs. If this was a cartoon, she thought, Tweety Bird would be flapping round my head right about now. Wearing ear-muffs.
She lay still for a few seconds, allowing the fog to clear, before blinking her eyes and cautiously running a mental and physical check on her battered body parts.
Legs: yep, still moving. Arms: definitely all right. Head? A bit jiggered around, but essentially okay. Probably no worse than usual, anyway. It was only a searing pain running from her coccyx that was giving her any trouble. She’d landed on her arse – which, thankfully, had enough padding on it to have saved her from anything more serious. Three cheers for fat-bottomed girls.
She looked up and around, saw other people making their way towards them. Saw the man – the stupid, stupid man, with the big hazel eyes and the inhuman ability to cycle at 700 miles per hour – lying spreadeagled a few feet away from her, his few tortured, jerky movements making an abstract art snow angel around his big, twisted body.
She crawled up onto her hands and knees, and inched in his direction, all the while yelling words of both anger and concern. He’d knocked her off her bike. He was an idiot, and deserved a good shouting at.
Her backpack had spilled open, and her precious edition of Alice in Wonderland was lying tattered and torn and dirty, soaking slush up into its beautiful illustrated pages. And her bum hurt. A lot. She felt like karate chopping him in the nether regions. Except…he seemed to be in a lot of pain. And that leg of his was kind of pointing the wrong way. And…shit, where was the phone? And why couldn’t she feel her fingers?
As she got close enough to see his face, she realised who he was. It was Him. The Hot Papa from the Park. The Man with the Tux. The Guy Who Made Christmas Jumpers Sexy. The gorgeous American hunk-a-rama who had accidentally tripped in and out of her life over the last few days.
She glanced around, saw his bike. The bike with the child seat fitted on the back. The bike that was crumpled and buckled and lying abandoned by the rear wall of Brasenose College.
“The baby!” she shouted in complete panic as she finally reached him. “Where’s the baby?”
The first time she’d seen him had been less dramatic, but in its own way just as memorable. She’d been with Ellen, in the park. Three days earlier.
“I think I might die of oestrogen poisoning if this carries on,” Ellen had said, looking on in disgust at the scene playing out in front of her.
“It’s like all these yummy mummies have died and gone to totty heaven. Not a single one of them is watching their kids – they could be smoking crack or eating dog poo for all they’d notice. They’re obviously all just thinking about shagging, and I now feel like I need to scrub my entire brain with bleach. I mean – come on, he’s wearing a Christmas jumper! Surely it’s in the feminist rule book that you should never kiss a man in a Christmas jumper? ”
It was the first day of December, and the temperatures had plummeted overnight, as though the weather gods had consulted a calendar and decided to up their game. Ellen’s invective was accompanied by a cloud of warm air gusting in front of her; and trainer clad feet kicked impatiently at the frost-rutted soil beneath the bench.
Her usually pretty face was twisted in contempt as she ranted, and she shook her head sadly as she unscrewed her water bottle. They’d just reached the end of a three-mile run around the park, and Ellen looked untouched by the effort apart from a slight flush to her cheeks, and a few auburn tendrils clinging to damp skin.
That, thought Maggie O’Donnell, was what happened when you were 18, and your body hadn’t yet been battered by life, childbirth, or too many nights in alone with Colin Farrell movies and a box of cream horns.
She herself had been battered aplenty by all three of those things, though at 34 she was still in pretty decent nick. Internally, at least. Not decent enough to have spare breath right at that moment, though. Instead, she attempted to smile at her irritatingly athletic daughter, sprawled on the bench next to her, and looked on at the playground panorama that had annoyed Ellen all the way into an anti-Vagina
