A Few of the Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

listen?
    Instead it was all this about the young ones wetting the bed, what with her mother being so long in hospital, and her father being so drunk. And somebody had to be there and do it and she was there and did it.
    I mean, Maggie’s marvelous, and what she did for those sisters and brothers was fantastic. Some of
them
are actually in college now. And she was tough, too. She got her father into some alcoholics’ program and he did stop eventually, I think. Didn’t he?
    Anyway, it was all too late for Maggie and somebody should have told her that it’s not so easy to go back to studying when you’re older. And they want babes, nowadays, not mature women. But it was getting harder to talk to her. All the old easy feeling had gone.
    And that’s what has her where she is now. Not that there’s anything wrong with it; working in a tacky kind of shop like that, selling all kinds of rubbish. But you know the way Maggie goes on. It’s lovely. She meets great people, they get marvelous bargains, it’s near home, one of the younger sisters has asthma or something and she likes to put a good meal on the table for her father. And honestly, she doesn’t seem to remember that we are all out for each other’s good. And that since we were the group they called MAD back at school, there was literally
nothing
we couldn’t say to each other.
    You get the feeling she’s become touchy.
    We never did touchy before, did we? But I didn’t like the way she reacted when I offered to give her my old jacket. It was a million times better than anything she had. A million. But Maggie said she wouldn’t have a call to wear it. What a strange phrase, instead of saying thank you and being delighted with it. Like we all would. If we were in a position to, I mean.
    And remember that time we went to have lunch with her in the posh hotel. It was almost embarrassing. Well, it wasn’t really embarrassing, what with her being Maggie and everything. But she seemed so out of place and asking could she take home the little sugar packets and paper napkins with the name of the place on them to her sisters. They were giving us such pitying looks. Did you notice?
    No? But then, Ange, to be honest, you are as blind as a bat these days.
    Anyway, it was impossible to get a thing out of Maggie about her own life and her plans or anything. She just kept saying she’d see what happened, as if that were any way to get anywhere.
    I don’t know whether you noticed, but she never answered a direct question. I know I asked if her father was still off the sauce and she said something totally waffly about him being marvelous, all things considered, which is neither a yes nor a no, so I asked again and she said that to some people drink was as natural as breathing. Where does that leave us?
    Then she was asking all about
my
mother and father and whether I should tell my father that my mum had been for tests. He might want to know. I said he had wanted to know very little else about her over the years since he left. She remembered everything, Maggie did, about when he left. More than I do. We were all twelve then. You’d swear it was her own family. Honestly, it was spooky. And she’s been to see my mother more often than I have.
    And it wasn’t only me. She knows all about your family, too, Angela. She said she heard from your brother who went to jail in Australia. I mean, I know you told us all about it at the time, but Maggie actually sends him postcards and things because he’d be lonely so far from home. She knows the name of the jail and all. And apparently he’s got very interested in birds, like in that film with Burt Lancaster. He writes to her about spangled drongos and galahs and things you’d never have heard of…
    Oh, he does to you, too? You keep in touch with him?
    That’s great. Great. Well, he
is
family, of course.
    No, I was just surprised that Maggie would.
    Yes, of course it’s kind of her.
    Maggie
is
kind. That’s what she does. And of