Page 29

28 MEG

Meg was standing outside the pub, looking up at the clouds, the roof tiles, and the awkward guttering bolted to the outside of the building. What was happening? What had just happened?

She had prepared, she had thought, for all eventualities. In quiet time in the days leading up to today, her brain had been rushing through everything that might go wrong. If they came; if they didn’t. Instead, this new thing had happened that she’d had no time to sort out in her head: her parents crashing down the doors of her own wedding, insisting and pulling rank that she do what they wanted, that if she wanted to marry Hannah, even that had to be under their terms.

She hated that she had shouted at them.

She hated that they’d come.

More than that, she hated that David, with all he’d been through with his parents, had maybe heard. She couldn’t look at him properly when she’d walked out.

It was embarrassing for Hannah, the person who was supposed to love her the most, to see her like this. She worried constantly about when Hannah would finally say this was enough, that this was not what she wanted for the one wedding day she would get in her life.

It was far more embarrassing that Mark, despite his protestations that this was all okay, and her parents’ fault not hers, was someone she had not spent that much time with at all and was seeing her act like a spoiled child.

She looked up. The sky was a pinky-grey, as if the sun was trying to break through but couldn’t manage, and Meg felt cold around her neck and shoulders. She wished she was wearing Hannah’s big pink fluffy jumper, something to comfort her. She felt restless and she felt adrift. She couldn’t leave everybody and go home, even though she wanted to be there more than anything in the world. She wanted Hannah and a blanket and the breakfast they loved. A cup of tea, made by somebody else. A biscuit and a hug.

She wanted, more than anything, to be somebody who could have a hard day and run back to their parents’ house and be made dinner and curl up in fresh sheets. She wanted a mother who would stroke her face and tell her everything was going to be okay. She wondered if she had ever had those parents.

If she went back in, they would be waiting for her to decide what to do, and if she went home, Hannah and maybe the others would find her there too. She would have to face the next three days. She would have to live them, in some form.

Breathe in for three, hold for four, breathe out for five.

She tried it but it didn’t work.

The idea of returning to normal, and being forced to return to real life, felt too much. She let the panic take her over. Maybe this is what she deserved. Screw the breathing exercises, screw calm. Maybe her parents were in the right, and maybe this had all been so stupid to expect that she’d be allowed the wedding that everybody else had had. A car rushed past suddenly out of nowhere, and she pictured it driving into a puddle, the water splashing all over her. Surely, it was one of those days.

As those thoughts swirled in her head, a memory came to her mind.

Twenty years ago, two decades, yet clear in her head as if it were happening now. She was at St Helens, happy to be in a concert at school as part of the choir. She remembered weeks of practice after school and more hours at home, to make sure that she, surely one of the weaker voices she had thought, could keep up with everybody else.

She remembered, when the day had come, the noise out in the hall from where they stood behind the curtain, of all the parents come to see their children. Her parents already worked in the school, so of course it was easier for them to come than anybody else. They might even be in the front row.

The whole choir was in position, and Meg had been breathing, trying to get calm before the start of the song, making sure her first note would be free of the panic of her nerves, and come out completely perfect.

When the curtain lifted, they began to sing, and she felt her voice lose control every time she saw a new face that wasn’t her mum or dad. She had eventually scanned the whole room and was sure they weren’t there; by then, she was also sure the others had noticed she wasn’t in time, in key, in line with everybody else. She felt markedly different, like she was under a spotlight.

Afterwards, milling around trying not to cry, a teacher, somebody new who must have worked one or two days a week, asked her where her parents were, said that she could go to them, and having to explain that they hadn’t come made the teacher speechless. Looking back, he should have said something comforting, but he didn’t. Eventually, Gus’s parents had waved her over.

She remembered the shame and she remembered the knowledge she was lying to them too, that they thought she was a nice friend of their son’s, that they would think differently if they knew all the thoughts that were in her head day and night.

Now, Meg began to run. She didn’t know where she wanted to be, but it wasn’t here, and it wasn’t with anyone, and it wasn’t here in the street where anybody could see her, or three days before a wedding that was fixed in time and that couldn’t just be ignored. The air braced her lungs, and there was drizzle on her face, all round her mouth as she tried to breathe. She kept going, her legs stamping on the pavement, her arms swinging, and though she felt dried out, the tears came again and again and again.