Rules for a Perfect Life

by Niamh Greene

‘By the way, I’ve spoken to Matilda about what she did,’ he goes on. ‘After tonight she’s grounded for two weeks.’

  ‘Ouch.’ I wince. ‘I’m guessing that didn’t go down too well.’ Two weeks is a long time in the life of a teenage girl – no wonder she was so quiet on the journey here.

  ‘No, it didn’t,’ he admits, looking pained. ‘But she knows what she did was wrong. Making up that story about a mad man was way out of order. And then to call Jimmy as well …’

  ‘She doesn’t like me very much.’ I state the obvious.

  ‘It’s not you, as such,’ he says. ‘I think she’s just struggled since her mum died. It’s been especially hard on her.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I say. ‘Losing your mother at such a difficult age must be terrible.’ Suddenly I feel really guilty that Matilda will be grounded because of what she did.

  I look to where she and Daniel are now slow-dancing nearby. Matilda looks like she’s in seventh heaven, although her spotty boyfriend seems supremely bored. Should I tell Edward that I caught them together in the cottage? If I tell him will he forbid them to see each other? That might make it worse.

  ‘I think it’s been easier on Polly,’ he says. ‘She remembers her mum, but she was so young when she died, it didn’t have quite the same impact.’

  ‘She’s such a character,’ I say, thinking about Polly. ‘She’s fearless, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, I wish she wasn’t, to be honest. Then she mightn’t get into so much trouble. Or get me into so much trouble, I should say.’

  ‘Nah, I think she’s great just the way she is.’ I giggle. ‘Things never get boring with her around!’

  Edward grins – I can see he’s very proud of his little girl. ‘She never stops talking, that’s for sure,’ he says.

  ‘You got that right!’

  ‘Matilda used to be just like her.’ He sighs. ‘She’s clammed up completely since her mum died.’

  ‘Teenage girls can be a mystery at the best of times,’ I agree.

  ‘What about you, Maggie? You’re pretty mysterious yourself.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ I blush.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he teases. ‘Tell me something, was coming here your idea?’

  ‘Well, I did want to escape city life,’ I murmur. ‘I wanted a break.’ And I had no job and nowhere to live, my inner voice adds.

  ‘But it was Claire who persuaded you that coming here was the right choice to make?’

  ‘More or less,’ I admit.

  ‘I thought as much. You hated it at first, didn’t you?’ he probes.

  ‘Hate is a very strong word,’ I say. ‘It was just all so different from what I was used to, I suppose.’

  ‘And how do you feel about it now?’ he says. ‘Are you just biding your time until you can leave?’

  Something in his tone makes me look up. He’s gazing at me, his eyes searching my face.

  ‘No, I like it here,’ I reply, my voice suddenly hoarse. It’s true. I do like it. I like it an awful lot.

  ‘Good,’ he whispers, his grip tightening around my waist. ‘Because I’m finding it hard to remember what it was like before you came.’

  We stare at each other, and I swallow. What does that mean? Am I imagining it or is an electric current fizzing between us?

  ‘OK, everyone, now we’re going to speed things up a bit!’ the lead singer bellows into his mic, and the spell between us is broken as the band begins to rock out to a much faster song. Instantly I feel like an awkward teenager when the slow set ends at the youth-club disco. I have no idea what to do or say. If I could rush outside and smoke an illicit ciggie with a pack of my giggly girlfriends I probably would.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Edward’s hand drops from my waist and he steps back from me.

  ‘Sure,’ I reply, my head spinning. I’m not a silly teenager, I’m an adult, and I have to try to remember to act like one. ‘I’ll just go and powder my nose.’

  ‘Powder my nose’? Where did that come from? Where do I think I am – in some sort of Victorian drama? I stumble away from him, embarrassed to have said something so stupid and trying to think straight. Did I dream the way he looked at me or misinterpret the meaning in his words? I must have. It was only a friendly dance, nothing more. There can’t have been electricity between us. Maybe the beef was bad, like Peg said. That must be why my tummy is now filled with jiving butterflies.

  ‘Enjoy that little rendezvous, did you?’ Odette is at my side before I reach the Ladies.

  ‘It was only a dance, Odette,’ I say, tempted to turn and run. ‘Completely innocent.’

  ‘I hope so, Maggie,’ she says icily. ‘It’s taken Edward a long time to get over his wife and move on. But now he has – and he’s moving on with me. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understand perfectly.’ I look into Odette’s eyes and they gleam back at me, the message crystal clear.

  ‘Good. Then we all know where we stand.’ She marches away, her chiffon dress swishing behind her. It seems to whisper menacingly as she moves: ‘Keep away, keep away.’

  Rule Twenty: Fake it till you make it

  ‘Have you seen this?’ Peg shoves a newspaper at me.

  I lean across the shop counter to get a better look. ‘Supermarket Chain Promises Twenty New Jobs!’ screams the headline.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ Ted says, his face creased with indignation. ‘They’ll stop at nothing to get what they want.’

  I quickly scan the article to get the general gist of the thing. It looks like the new supermarket is on a serious PR campaign to garner support in the village. Someone has leaked the news that the development will bring at least twenty jobs to the area – possibly more. And the supermarket says it won’t employ any outsiders, not even in the management positions. They want locals to fill the jobs. The paper says the top brass wants the store to be ‘part of the community’ and having locals working on the shop floor is their ‘top priority’. It’s a smart move, and obviously intended to get the villagers on-side.

  ‘I suppose it would provide new jobs for the village,’ I say doubtfully, not knowing how they’re going to take this opinion. Anytime anyone has suggested that the locality could do with the jobs, Peg and Ted have pooh-poohed the idea.

  ‘Bah!’ Peg huffs. ‘No one here would take a job with those – those monsters. We’d rather die.’

  ‘That’s right!’ Ted agrees.

  ‘Ted said he’d lie down in front of a bulldozer first, didn’t you, Ted?’ Peg looks very determined. ‘He has a rebel heart, even if his cholesterol is sky high. Glacken could be put on the map for it – just like Tiananmen Square!’

  Ted looks a little nervous at this – I’m guessing that Peg might expect him to follow through on his promise if push came to shove.

  ‘They’re hardly monsters, though, are they?’ I suggest carefully. ‘I mean, business is business and all that. And it does say here that they want to be part of the community – that could be a genuine sentiment.’

  ‘How can you say that, Maggie?’ Peg looks mortally offended. ‘I thought you knew where we were coming from, what we stood for. If that supermarket moves to the village it will destroy everything! It’s not about cheap tomatoes that have been imported from Spain – this is about a way of life. I thought you understood that. You of all people. We can’t back down at the first hurdle. That would mean we had no moral compass.’

  Peg makes to take the newspaper from me, tears glittering in her eyes. This has all gone wrong. I never meant to upset her or Ted, just point out that some people in the village may welcome new job opportunities, which are pretty few and far between, these days – I should know. I don’t want to offend either of them – I’m actually really fond of them both, something I’ve recently come to realize.

  ‘I’m sorry, Peg,’ I backtrack. ‘Of course I know what this means to you all. I was just trying to be objective.’

  ‘We don’t want people to go without jobs, Maggie,’ Ted says, looki
ng wounded. ‘We’re not that insensitive.’

  Then he reaches for another Mars Bar and tears off the wrapper. That won’t do anything for his cholesterol problem: if he has a heart-attack here and now it’ll be my fault. I desperately try to remember any of the first aid I learned in Girl Guides as I watch him munch, but my mind is a complete and utter blank. If Ted collapses and goes into cardiac arrest right in front of me I won’t be able to do a thing to stop it – and I can’t help feeling it’ll serve me right for being so thoughtless.

  Peg looks at Ted, then back at me, as if I have totally betrayed her trust and, to make matters worse, I have hounded her beloved husband to his certain artery-clogged death-by-chocolate.

  ‘I really didn’t mean to upset you, Peg,’ I try. ‘I said the wrong thing, I’m sorry.’

  She shoots me another injured look. God, she’s really good at this. I feel awful, like a traitor.

  ‘Tell you what, why don’t we convene another meeting?’ I blurt. The words are out of my mouth before I know it. I have no idea why I just suggested that – especially because getting myself more embroiled in village politics is the last thing I want to do. But seeing Peg tearful and distressed has really got to me and I have to do something to make her feel better. I can’t take the accusatory looks any more.

  ‘Why would you do that?’ She eyes me suspiciously.

  Simply expressing my doubts about the supermarket has made her wary of me. Still, this is progress. At least she’s talking again. ‘Because I want to help. Honestly I do. If we have another meeting we can talk it through and try to come up with something to combat this – this …’ I search for the right words to express myself ‘… PR exercise.’

  ‘What do you know about PR?’ she says cautiously. But there’s a definite glint of interest.

  ‘Loads,’ I gush, eager to impress them both. ‘I used to manage all the PR campaigns in the office.’

  This is true. We never hired a PR agency at Hanly’s. It was up to Dom and me to come up with campaigns to help sell the properties we had on the books and we were pretty good at it. We started off sending pens to journalists and progressed to organizing champagne lunches to schmooze the media whenever a new development came on to the market. Dermot was never too comfortable with those lunches – he always thought that developments should speak for themselves. I wonder how he is and whether Yvonne, his gold-digging wife, has upped and left him now that she knows the truth. If she knows the truth. From the way Dermot was talking before I left, he was going to hide the dire financial situation from her for as long as possible.

  ‘What office?’ Peg stares at me blankly and I suddenly remember that she thinks I’m a full-time artist, not an unemployed estate agent. I can’t confess now. If I do, then she’ll never trust me again.

  ‘I mean the office in the gallery,’ I say quickly, thinking on my feet. ‘When I had my exhibitions we had to invite press, whip up a bit of media interest, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Peg’s eyes light up. ‘What sort of things did you do?’

  ‘Well, we sent them gifts.’ I grab at straws.

  ‘Gifts?’ Ted echoes.

  ‘Yes – you know, to butter them up. Make sure we got a mention in the press.’

  ‘You gave them stuff to get in the paper?’

  ‘Sometimes. Everyone does it. It’s common practice – journalists expect to get goodie-bags, it’s part of the PR thing. Like a perk of the job.’

  I’m anxious she understands that I wasn’t doing anything wrong – that would make things even worse.

  ‘Goodie-bags?’ Peg says. ‘Like actors get at the Oscars? I’ve read about that in Hello!. They get all sorts in them, don’t they? Like diamonds. Celebs love their diamonds.’

  ‘Well, yes. We didn’t do anything as fancy as the Oscars obviously – we couldn’t afford to give out diamonds, that’s for sure!’

  I laugh to break the tension, but Peg doesn’t join in. She’s busy, lost in thought.

  ‘I get you.’ Ted is intrigued. ‘You give them stuff, they give you good press.’

  ‘Something like that – you scratch their back, they scratch yours. I’m not saying we have to do that in this case, of course.’

  ‘Say no more. We understand exactly what you’re getting at,’ Peg says, ‘don’t we, Ted?’

  ‘I think we do, my love, I think we do. Leave it with us, Maggie – we’ll round up the troops. I’ll text you with the details, OK?’ Ted is delighted.

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  ‘In fact, I’ll send a group text to everyone, let them know what’s happening. I can do it on-line.’

  ‘You can?’ How does he know how to do that?

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You should tweet about it too, Ted,’ Peg says.

  ‘You’re right, my love, I’ll update my Twitter account with the details – good idea. Do you use it yourself, Maggie?’

  ‘What? The Internet?’

  ‘No, Twitter.’ He looks at me eagerly.

  ‘Twitter? No, I don’t.’

  ‘Ah, you should!’ Peg chimes in. ‘It’s a great yoke for keeping in touch. Isn’t it, Ted?’

  ‘It is. You can let everyone know what you’re up to.’

  ‘Of course, some people, naming no names, use it for their own self-promotion purposes.’ Peg’s mouth tightens.

  ‘Betty from the butcher’s,’ Ted explains. ‘She updates her account far too much.’

  ‘She does!’ Peg confirms. ‘I mean, do we all need to know about some stupid sausage-roll competition she won? No, we do not.’

  ‘Twitter shouldn’t be used to blow your own trumpet,’ Ted says.

  ‘You’re right, Ted. It’s not that sort of medium. Now Facebook – that’s what she should be using, much more up her street. Jimmy likes his Facebook, too, doesn’t he, Ted?’

  ‘He does. Jimmy loves Facebook,’ Ted agrees.

  ‘Jimmy? The guard?’

  ‘Yes. That’s how he found those dogs of his – the ones he rescued. One of his Facebook friends tipped him off.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Nice fella, Jimmy.’

  ‘He is,’ Peg agrees. ‘Sound as a pound.’

  There’s a pause. An undeniably pregnant pause.

  ‘Of course, you have to be very careful what you say to him, like.’

  ‘You do?’ Crap. What did I say to him that night in Rose Cottage?

  ‘Ah, yeah, you do.’

  ‘Jimmy likes to take notes – keep records. It’s the promotion thing, you see.’

  ‘The promotion?’

  ‘Yes, the inspector likes the note-taking, and Jimmy reckons if he does it enough he’ll be promoted.’ Ted nods.

  ‘It’s why he walks those greyhounds at the crack of dawn too. He likes to see what people are up to early in the morning,’ Peg explains.

  ‘You mean he spies on people?’

  ‘Well, it’s not spying exactly,’ Peg says.

  Really? That’s what it sounds like to me. No wonder he was so eager to write down everything I said that night.

  ‘No, not spying,’ Ted agrees. ‘More keeping an eye on things.’

  ‘That’s how Betty was caught, isn’t it, Ted?’ Peg’s face lights up at the memory.

  ‘It is! Getting dodgy meat deliveries she was – she wasn’t meeting health regulations. Jimmy had the whole thing written down. The health inspectors were very interested in his notes. Very interested.’

  ‘She’s lucky she’s still in business.’ Peg smirks.

  ‘She is,’ Ted agrees.

  This is surreal. Absolutely surreal.

  ‘No wonder we couldn’t find you on-line so, Maggie,’ Ted says. ‘You’re a bit of a technological dinosaur.’

  ‘Um, yes, I guess I am,’ I say. They were looking for me on-line? Oh, no. I never thought about that.

  ‘Yes, there was only one other Maggie Baxter on there – some estate agent in the city,’ Ted says. ‘Isn’t that funny? Your names
ake is an estate agent, imagine that!’

  ‘But of course you use a pseudonym to paint, don’t you, Maggie?’ Peg says. ‘That’s why we couldn’t find you.’

  ‘Um, yes, I do,’ I say. I’m holding my breath.

  This is it: the game is up. It’s all over. Any second now, they’re going to ask me what that pseudonym is. I brace myself, but the question never comes. They’re too distracted by the idea of another meeting, which they’re now discussing passionately. ‘I’d better get on,’ I say eventually.

  ‘Yes, of course. Why don’t you leave your list here and we’ll drop the groceries up to the cottage for you?’ Peg smiles.

  ‘You do home delivery?’

  ‘Of course!’ She giggles. ‘This is the twenty-first century, Maggie – we don’t live in prehistoric times. You can email us your list next time, if you like. Lots of people do.’

  ‘I don’t have Internet access,’ I say, gobsmacked. A tiny village shop, with dusty tins of Spam on its shelves, accepts email orders?

  ‘No Internet access?’ Ted is aghast. ‘How can you live without email? That’s very unreasonable – you’ll have to speak to Edward about it.’

  ‘You will,’ Peg says solemnly. ‘He can’t expect you to live without the web – sure how would you watch the new Desperate Housewives otherwise?’

  ‘You’d be forever waiting to see it on the telly,’ Ted agrees. ‘It’s so much easier to stream it on-line, isn’t it?’

  I stagger back into the street, as if I’m emerging from some sort of time-travelling vortex, my head spinning. Facebook? Twitter? Web streaming? What’s going on? I would have confidently bet my life that Peg and Ted had never even heard of the Internet, let alone be so au fait with it. They defy my expectations on so many levels, it’s mind-boggling.

  I’m wandering back towards my car when I spot Odette approaching in the distance, her pastel twinset rippling under the midday sun. She’s the last person on earth I want to meet. Well, maybe not the last person – I wouldn’t exactly like to run into Robert either. But running into my ex is hardly likely here.

  Looking wildly to right and left, I search desperately for somewhere to hide. My car is too far away – I’ll never make it there in time. Should I do a Starsky and Hutch roll under the abandoned Massey Ferguson with the missing wheel? Or go back into the Village Store? Doing the roll is the more attractive option: I may get killed but at least I won’t have to explain myself to Peg and Ted.