Lovely Harry, with the nervous blink? Really?
And the thought hit her: was it possible that Nick obsessed about her safety not because he was unreasonably paranoid, but because Lulu was a ditzy idiot who lost her credit card about once a month and got herself locked in shops and hadn’t a clue that the lovely young porter she bantered with was a sleazy creep who was –
The front door swished open.
Lulu ducked down behind the desk, the notebook clutched to her chest.
She held her breath as footsteps clomped across the polished floor. Coming closer . . .
Coming, suddenly, round the desk!
And then Harry’s face was looming over her, eyes blinking rapidly. ‘Mrs Clyde! Are you okay?’
She scrambled away from him, the notebook still clutched in one hand, and then she was up and running for the door, and he was running after her shouting, ‘Hey, Mrs Clyde! No, wait!’ but Lulu was out of the door and off, her trainers pounding the cobbled wharf that ran round the harbour, and there were people here, a couple on one of the boats, a woman walking ahead of her with a heavy bag on her arm, a man talking on his phone who looked up at her in surprise as she ran past.
When she’d reached the other side of the harbour, she stopped and turned. Harry was standing at the door of the building, watching her. When he saw her looking, he shook his head at her in a defeated gesture.
Lulu pulled out her phone and called Nick.
4
Maggie - August 1997
Nick picked a chunk of green icing off his cupcake. ‘Practically radioactive! Is this a challenge to see how many e-numbers you can get into us, Mags? And what the hell’s this?’ He tapped the floral plate she’d put the cupcake on. ‘You been raiding a skip, Mags?’
Maggie hadn’t brought much with her to Sunnyside, having donated most of her stuff to charities, but she’d thought this set of vintage tea plates a customer had given her last Christmas would be classy enough to slide under the radar at Sunnyside. Seemed she’d been wrong.
‘Stop calling me Mags, you wee monster,’ she said, like she still found it funny, like it wasn’t seriously pissing her off. She’d told Nick, when they were looking through the wedding cards, that she hated being called Mags, but some of her friends couldn’t seem to help themselves. ‘Oh, okay, Mags,’ he’d grinned, and it had become a joke between them, that he called her Mags. But he’d started using the name in every second sentence, and it had stopped being funny.
‘Not that Meebs is bothered.’ Nick pointed his fork at Andy Jardine, who was sitting opposite him at the kitchen table and had already lifted his cupcake to his mouth and taken a big bite. ‘He’ll hoover up anything you put in his path. You know why he’s called Meebs? Short for amoeba. Because amoebas are pretty much the lowest form of animal life there is? Don’t even have a ganglion, Mags, let alone a brain. But also because they phagocytose anything within range that’s vaguely edible.’
Andy just took all this, keeping on chewing like his life depended on it. Nick looked at him, the way a scientist might look at a not-very-interesting specimen.
‘Hey, Meebs.’ Nick flicked the piece of green icing at him. It bounced off Andy’s face and landed on the table.
Andy picked it up and added it to the food already in his mouth.
‘QED!’ Nick laughed. ‘Bloody QED!’
Andy just smiled his lopsided smile. Poor Andy had a scar running through the side of his mouth, deforming his lips and pulling down the left side of his lumpy face, so when he smiled, only the right side of his mouth turned up. Maggie couldn’t help thinking he looked like one of those clowns in a horror film.
He was a weird best friend for Nick to have, this big lummock of a boy with about as much spark as a brick. The conversation between the two of them, from what Maggie could make out, wasn’t the usual banter between teenage boys. Whatever Nick batted at Andy, Andy just let whistle past without even attempting to hit it back.
‘You’d better watch that Andy doesn’t phagocytose you, you cheeky wee bugger,’ she said, determinedly cheery.
‘Well, granted, that’s always a worry, Mags.’
She couldn’t say exactly when her interactions with Nick had gone to pish, but it had been going on for days, this sniping at her, but always in a jokey way, so if she’d pulled him up about it she’d look like she was having a sense of humour failure.
Carol Jardine, thank God, arrived ten minutes later to take Andy home. You could easily tell she was Andy’s ma, overweight and with the same lumpy face, but she was all smiles and chat. It was like Carol’s spark had somehow not made it through on the genes she’d passed on to Andy. Or maybe it was down to Andy’s facial deformity. That must be hard for a teenager.
Carol was all over Nick, asking about school, saying he must be looking forward to the start of the rugby season and how she’d heard great things about his chances of making the national squad this year, despite being at least a year younger than most of the other boys in the first fifteen.
‘He’s such a star, isn’t he?’ she gushed.
Maggie made like she hadn’t heard, clattering about at the sink.
Nick was sooking up, all smiles and compliments, and Carol was giggling, the daft cow. On the way out, she tapped her son on the arm. ‘What do you say?’ like he was a fucking five-year-old.
‘Thanks very much, Mrs Clyde,’ muttered Andy.
Half an hour later and it was Duncan sitting at the table drinking tea and eating a green-iced cupcake. Finally, Maggie could relax, sticking her upper lip over the rim of her mug to suck up tea from long range. Best way to cool it down, and it made the surface of the tea ripple like a stormy sea, which always gave Maggie childish satisfaction. She’d taught Duncan the method, and he was doing it too. A slurp duet.