River Deep Read Online Free PDF Page A

me. I just want to see him, to see for myself that he really means it. I can’t believe he means it …’ Maggie’s voice trailed off as she looked around the empty bar.
    ‘Oh, he meant it, my girl,’ Sheila said bluntly. ‘How long did he say he was sleeping with this other tart? Couple of months, wasn’t it? That weren’t a mistake, love, I’m only surprised you never noticed it before.’
    Maggie winced, but somehow Sheila’s realism comforted her. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said bleakly.
    ‘Here she is.’ Maggie’s mum and dad entered the bar and Maggie had to blink a couple of times to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating. The old faded jeans that her dad now wore under his beer belly instead of over it had been replaced by a beige suit and brown tie, vintage eighties by the looks of it, and her mum had found a white blouse from somewhere and was wearing her knee-length ‘respectable’ skirt, her bare legs shining palely against the red of the material. They usually only got themselves up in this apparel for weddings and christenings, and Maggie was fairly certain no one was getting married this Friday lunchtime.
    ‘Blimey,’ Sheila said without cracking a smile. ‘The whole world’s all suited and booted today, makes me feel quite dowdy.’ She fingered her gold chains as she spoke.
    Marion smiled briefly at Sheila and smoothed down the skirt she clearly felt uncomfortable in before speaking to her daughter.
    ‘The thing is, darling, we thought if you didn’t have anything on you might come with us to the bank. We’ve got to see Mr Shah and I … well, I thought that with all your experience you’d be able to give us a bit of support, cut in with a bit of jargon here and there. You know me and your dad, we never really get to grips with all that.’
    Maggie shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m on my way to see Christian. I mean …’ She looked at her parents. She knew they hated any kind of institution, especially financial ones. They had never been happy with participating in capitalism, and if it had been up to them the whole family would have kept circumnavigating the globe for the rest of their lives, just as they had done for the first seven years of Maggie’s.
    As as child, Maggie had been all over Asia (barring the communist bits) by the time she was five, and had done some of South America and most of India by seven. The only places her parents never seemed to want to ‘discover’ were the kinds of places with basic amenities, TV and chips. But one unbearably hot morning not far from the banks of the River Ganges, seven-year-old Maggie had lain down in the dust and screamed like a banshee, shouting the same thing over and over again: ‘I want to go home. I want to go home to ENGLAND!’, until her throat was raw, her skin covered in an angry blotchy red rash, her eyes and nose streaming. She had had enough. Enough of mosquito nets, enough of hot spicy food, enough of temples and monks and monkeys in the street. It was the culmination of several months of pleading, screaming and howling that had always fallen on deaf ears.
    Maggie had begun to feel this way after a brief trip back to England to see her grandparents. She had been entranced by the cool darkness of her native country’s flat silver sky, the remarkable moist greenness of the countryside and, most of all, by her grandparents’ bungalow. Restfully beige and cream throughout and relentlessly neat and clean, Maggie just ached for her own mantlepiece with her own collection of china figurines of ladies selling flowers, their porcelain faces tipped up with rosy-cheeked smiles.
    Another child might have dreamt of going
to
Tibetan monasteries or Thai fish markets, but from that moment Maggie dreamed of nothing but suburbia, her childish idea of a normal, peaceful English life. She’d started crying on the plane out to India and didn’t stop for three months, even recruiting her three-year-old brother into