Past Secrets (33 page)

One enormous oil-stained hand appeared from under the jeep, gripped the edge of the car and pulled. Maggie found herself staring down at a giant of a man who was looking up at her with undisguised mirth. He was filthy with dirt on his overalls, in his face, even in his hair, which was dark except for a few streaks of grey near his temples, and cut as close to his head as any marine’s.

She was relieved to see that his face was nice, a bit square with a nose that looked as if he’d taken a few punches in the ring, and that his smile, because he was smiling broadly, was friendly.

He got to his feet lightly for such a huge man and stood towering over her. Good-looking, in an outdoorsy way, she thought absently, and probably Grey’s age or thereabouts.

‘You want to use the petrol-sucking vacuum?’

he said evenly in a low gravelly voice. He wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand.

‘If that’s all right?’ said Maggie. With any luck, she’d be home in no time and nobody would he any the wiser.

‘Jack,’ he called to the young guy. ‘Where’s the petrol-sucking machine?’

Jack had to bend over with a sudden spasm. ‘You’re telling me you don’t know where it is?’

inquired Ivan. ‘What do I pay you guys for? Mick?’

A face appeared from under the bonnet of a Citroen. ‘Yeah?’

‘The petrol-sucking machine. You got it?’

Mick’s gaze flickered over Maggie and knowledge began to dawn.

‘Right,’ she said, in a shaky voice. ‘The joke’s on me. There is no petrol-sucking machine.’ ‘Whaddya think this is? A milking parlour?’

asked Mick, before succumbing to the same spasms as Jack and doubling up with laughter.

Ivan, the giant, looked at her with mischief in his face. He had the deepest brown eyes she’d ever seen, and they positively glittered with humour.

His mouth quivered at the edges, as he tried to stop himself grinning and failed.

It had been a horrible few days, in which her world had turned upside down, and Maggie felt that if one more person made her feel she was

stupid, she was going to hit them, so help her. Her composure shattered.

‘It’s not funny!’ she shrieked, reaching out and thumping the bonnet of the jeep he’d been working on.

This was it, the last straw. All the pent-up fury at seeing Grey in bed with someone else, at running home to find her mother injured and herself appointed in charge, at discovering that Grey had a bloody harem and it had been happening under her nose, it all came flooding out. Thump, thump went her curled-up fist on the bonnet.

‘I just wanted some help and nobody appreciates it. You jackasses think it’s the biggest laugh ever to snigger at someone in trouble.’ Thump, thump.

Ivan clamped her wrists in his steely hands and gently lowered them to her side.

‘You’ll hurt yourself and it was only a joke,’ he said tenderly. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you sounded so funny.’

‘You thought you’d take the mickey out of me, well, I’ve had that done enough lately, thank you very much,’ Maggie said, dry sobbing. She ran out of the workshop to the car, sat in the driver’s seat and started it up. The engine turned over instantly, allowed her to drive a few yards then suddenly belched loudly and died like an elephant in great pain.

‘Horrible, horrible car!’ she said, crying on the steering wheel. She banged it hard, succeeding only in making her aware of how much she’d hurt her hand from bashing the jeep in the garage. ‘Ow!’

The driver’s door was opened and Ivan squatted down beside her seat, apology written all over his face.

‘It’s better not to drive it,’ he said. As kindly as if he was taking care of a tiny baby, he helped her out of the car and took the keys. ‘I’ll drive you and your shopping home, and I’ll look after the car.’

‘You will do no such thing, you jumped-up pump jockey,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll bring my own bloody shopping home, thank you very much.’

Ivan looked into the back of the car which was piled with grocery bags.

‘You sure?’ ‘I’m sure.’

She pulled every single bag out and dragged them to the kerb. ‘I’ll be back for the car tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Just bloody fix it, will you?’

Ivan nodded and went back into his workshop, whereupon Maggie got out her phone and dialled a taxi. So much for selfconfidence.

Una

was thrilled with the leaflet, which advertised a meeting at the park at eight o’clock in the evening in two days’ time. And to Maggie’s relief neither of her parents laughed or were angry when she explained, rather bashfully, what had happened to the car. ‘I can’t face going there to fetch it, I’m so embarrassed,’ she said, ‘but I suppose I must.

Except I’ve got to work.’

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ said her father, giving her a hug. ‘The garage isn’t far from the doctor’s surgery and I must fetch a new prescription for your mother. It won’t take me long to walk up there and I’ll kill the two birds with the one stone.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Maggie, remembering that she was supposed to be strong and confident now, facing up to her mistakes. Except she just couldn’t face those men in the garage again, especially the big one, Ivan. ‘I could go after work,’ she said.

‘It’ll do your dad good to get out,’ said Una sternly, and so the burden was lifted.

In return, Maggie wasn’t surprised to find that she was expected to be postie for the leaflets. She spent several hours late the following afternoon braving yappy dogs and pushing the leaflets through doors of the neighbouring streets and asking local shops to site them in their windows.

One of the last places .Maggie visited was the Summer Street Cafe, where Henry and Jane were thrilled to hear about Una’s call to arms.

‘That’s fabulous, and so professional,’ said Jane, reading the leaflet Maggie showed her and passing it to Xu, the shy Chinese waitress.

Xu smiled but said nothing. In all the time Maggie had spent in the cafe recently, she’d never heard Xu speak a word. But she smiled a lot, like she was doing now.

‘Well done to your mother,’ said Henry. ‘She’s a great woman. I can see where you got it from.’ ‘Oh,’ said Maggie, pleased, and she flushed.

‘It’s very good of you to come home and look after her,’ Henry went on. ‘I know it has been difficult for you, but she’s a good woman. Now, since you’re doing so much for the community, would you like a latte on the house, or is it cappuccino you drink?’

‘Plain old white coffee for me,’ said Maggie, ‘and thank you, that would be nice. It’s weary work delivering all these.’

‘That looks lovely,’ said Maggie politely, when Xu brought her the coffee.

Xu bobbed her head in reply. She must be lonely, Maggie thought suddenly. The girl was young, probably only in her mid-twenties, half a world away from home. Maggie wondered whether she had any friends. Jane and Henry were sweet people but probably not sparkling company for a voting girl.

Word of the onslaught against the council quickly spread and the following night, at eight o’clock, the park was jammed with people from Summer Street and the surrounding streets all wanting to know what they could do to save it.

Maggie had been at work all day and so wasn’t entirely sure what her mother’s plan was. She was a bit disappointed to find out that all Una had thought of was a petition, signed by everybody and their granny, saying the evil developers shouldn’t get their way and the council owed it to the people of Summer Street and the whole area

to save their park. ‘We need our voices to be heard!’

said Una Maguire, standing at the front of the crowd, brandishing a crutch.

Maggie thought her mother had turned out to be surprisingly good at this rabble-rousing. Who’d have thought it?

‘A petition is going to be no good,’ a man down the back shouted dismissively, and privately Maggie had to agree with him. ‘They don’t take notice of petitions. We’ll have to do something else, something more forceful.’

‘Like what?’ demanded Una. ‘Come on, suggestions, please. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’

This started a row with people shouting at the man down the back for trying to rain on their parade, while his supporters shouted that a petition was going to be no good whatsoever. What was needed was legal action or political involvement.

It

was descending into chaos and even Una seemed to have run out of energy.

The man at the back got fed up and shouted, ‘Who else can help? Anyone with friends on the council?’

Maggie looked around to see if there was somebody there who was up to leading the charge.

Ideally somebody who knew how councils and businesses worked, she thought, and who could go through the proper channels. But she realised there were no volunteers. Everyone wanted the park saved, but, apart from Una, there wasn’t anyone ready to stand up and do it.

It was the curse of the modern age, her mother often said, when it came to getting people to help out with charities and meals on wheels: everybody was too busy with their own lives to do much for anyone else.

‘Well,’ Maggie said, reluctantly, feeling she ought to help her mother out. ‘I do work in the library and I suppose I would be able to research how we could go about this.’

She’d hardly got the words out of her mouth before people were saying, Yes, good woman, fair play to you, brilliant idea. Then the man who had heckled Una smiled broadly at the tall, slender redhead and called out, ‘Chairwoman, let’s have her for chairwoman.’ And, without realising it, Maggie Maguire - who’d never so much as captained a friendly netball game in school - was elected chairwoman of the rapidly formed Save Our Pavilion committee.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ said her mother as they headed home, after several other people had been elected on to the committee, buoyed up by Maggie’s supreme sacrifice and the hope that she’d do all the work. ‘I knew you’d know what to do. I thought, if I started you off on the right path, you’d follow through. Didn’t I say that, Dennis, didn’t IF

‘Yes,’ said Maggie’s father happily. ‘Your mother always says you’re well able to run things.

You can do anything, our Maggie can do anything.’

‘And,’ her mother went on, ‘we should have a big party, in the park, when we get it all settled.’ ‘Hold on a minute,’ said Maggie, ‘nothing’s settled yet. We might not win. Mum, be realistic.’

Maggie was still shocked at how quickly it had all happened - shocked and horrified. She was chairwoman of the committee. Chairwomen were tough, no-nonsense women like Shona, not wimpy people who had cheating ex-boyfriends and put petrol in diesel vehicles. If only there was a way out of it, but she knew there wasn’t.

What if she made a complete mess of the whole project?

‘Ah now,’ said her mother, confidence written all over her face. ‘You’ll have worked it out, I know well you will. There’s nothing you can’t do.’

‘She’s mad. Breaking her leg has affected her brain,’

Maggie said on the phone to Elisabeth. She’d needed to get out of the house and had taken her mobile and walked slowly along Summer Street, thinking that Elisabeth might understand.

‘Your mother was always mad,’ said Elisabeth absently. Her office sounded noisy and busy. ‘Not normal mad: thinking-I-can-do-everything mad. It’s different,’ Maggie went on.

‘She always thought you could do everything,’

Elisabeth said, surprised. ‘It used to drive me nuts.

Your mother never stopped talking about how clever you were and how marvellous your report cards were, which made my mother obsessed with my report cards being as good. The pressure.’

‘Really?’ Maggie couldn’t quite remember that.

All she could recall from school was the misery and how she’d never been able to tell anyone, apart from Elisabeth. ‘If only I could do everything,’ she added gloomily.

‘Maggie, listen to me.’ Elisabeth sounded stern, the way she spoke to teenage models on the phone, Maggie guessed. ‘I’m up to my tonsils with work here and I’m irritable, which means I’m going to say something I’ve wanted to say for a long time, something I’ll probably regret saying because you’ll be hurt but I’ve got to do it: stop feeling sorry for yourself about what happened at school and get on with your life.’

Maggie gasped.

‘I know you’re going to hate me for saying this, but I’ve got to. You are clever and funny, you can do anything, and you should stop thinking otherwise.

Now you’ve dumped that loser boyfriend of yours for good, go out and get a life. Auntie Una’s right: you can do anything. You’re the only person who doesn’t believe it. Gotta go, bye.’

It took Maggie a full thirty seconds to take the phone away from her ear. Elisabeth had never spoken to her like that in her life. She was shocked.

Elisabeth was the only one who’d known what had gone on in school, her only ally and now she had turned against her.

Maggie walked along in stunned silence, oblivious to where she was going. But finally something odd happened. In the midst of the shock and the self-pity, she began to feel a glimmer of selfworth.

Everyone seemed to think she was capable of so much. They couldn’t all be lying, could they?

Later that night, the gloom settled once more. It was sinking in that she’d somehow been elected as chairwoman of a committee with a tough job to do.

‘I don’t even know how to run a committee,’

she moaned to Shona on the phone. ‘I was never even on the debating team in college!’

‘Oh, babes,’ said Shona easily, ‘it’ll be no bother to you. You’ve seen plenty of university committees at work, you know how it goes. People sit around in rooms, have arguments, discuss things, discuss them even more, break for tea and biscuits and finally agree to disagree. At the end, they make arrangements to meet up at the same time next week where they’ll go over all the same stuff again, Simple.’

‘I know,’ groaned Maggie. ‘That’s what I don’t want. I want this committee to actually save the park, not talk about it until the cows come home or until the developers whip a JCB in one night and pull the pavilion down, making the whole thing a fait accompli.’

‘Right,’ said Shona, thoughtfully. ‘You mean this is a committee where you actually want to achieve something. Mmm. University life doesn’t prepare you for that. Paul,’ she shouted, ‘Maggie’s chairwoman of a committee and they actually want to get something done. What should she do?’